As I said on the first line, no ranking of any kind can be trusted 100%, I pointed out an alternative to distrowatch, and why I would trust it a bit more, not saying I really trust it, or that I believe every result.

It is less popular so it could be a case like OpenMandriva has it integrated to upload automatically for all its users by default, or they found another way to game that ranking.

When I see any ranking, I do research when I see a distro that is suspiciously positioned, and I haven’t heard about outside the place I saw it referenced, and even so I always stick to mainline distros.

Honest results would need a standard way that every distro adopts and make an opt-out (not opt-in) regular upload thing similar to what linux-hardware.org does, and be actively trying to mitigate or deny certain distros or specific actors from tampering with the results, and we don’t have that.

Page rankings, clicks, scripts, etc. are not enough if every device doesn’t ping it in a legitimate way (fake user agent or other means), and there is always the case of people that will opt-out or block this as they don’t want to be tracked.

On your point of something like Alexa Page Rankings, the thing I would add is that, at least for me, if it is a ranking shown by a corporation, it is not trustworthy.

I think there is no ranking site that can be 100% trusted.

That said, I trust linux-hardware.org a bit more than distro watch, even if it’s not as popular, because you have to intentionally download an app/script for it to scan and upload your distro/hardware data (so no page clicks or just traffic, you must have the distro installed), and if you repeatedly try to upload the same distro/hardware data, it doesn’t count multiple uploads on its statistics, if they are not at least a month apart.

Edit: and even on linux-hardware you have strange results like OpenMandriva and ROSA as Distros on top 15, and I have never heard of them outside there, and from what I can find they are somewhat popular in Russia and some parts of Europe

There is an update on the RSS situation of selfh.st; TL, DR: seems to be related to ways to monetize, so now it’s available to paid subscription, but for free have to visit site to read.

https://selfh.st/post/2025-08-08-introducing-member-perks/

As others have already commented, what you need is a Dynamic DNS service, where you register a subdomain, and setup a small program or script on your computer that pings the DDNS server every few minutes, that way you leave that running on the background, and if the program detects that the IP with the request changes, it will update the subdomain to point to it automatically.

You could access the blog from the subdomain of the DDNS directly or if you get your own domain, you can point it to the DDNS.

If you want a recommendation, I have been using DuckDNS for years, and it has been pretty reliable.

what is a good solution to keep a music folder backed up

syncthing (file sync, update: removed this, not needed, actually need a backup solution)

Backup solution, you could use Borg or Restic, they are CLI, but there are also GUI for them

how can I back up my Docker setup in case I screw it up and need to set it all up again?

learn to use Dockage to replace Portainer (done, happy with this)

If you did the switch to Dockge, it might be because you prefer having your docker compose files accessible easily on the filesystem, the question is if you have the persistent data of your containers in bind mounts as well, so they are easy to backup.

I have a git repo of my stacks folder, with all my docker compose files (secrets on env files that are ignored), so that I can track all changes made to them.

Also, I have a script that stops every container while I’m sleeping and triggers backups of the stacks folder and all my bind mount folders, that way I have a daily/weekly backup of all my stuff, and in case something breaks, I can roll back from any of these backups and just docker compose up, and I’m back on track.

An important step, is to frequently check that backups are good, I do this by stopping my main service and running from a different folder with the backed up compose file and bind mounts

Same, have used it for years, both on terminal and with qtpass GUI, on Linux and Windows desktops, the lack of a maintained android client, has me looking into keepassxc and vaultwarden, still haven’t made a switch.

There is an intro video to see the features, is really good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15_-hgsX2V0

Used Gitea for a while, and decided to switch to Forgejo before the hard fork split (no more code from Gitea), been using it since, In my opinion both work well, but prefer Forgejo.

Having the ability to shut down the main instance of an app and run a secondary instance from backups without much hassle is the best feeling ever, I recently updated from Nextcloud v26 to v31, and having the ability to just go back to a working version if anything was wrong saved me from so much stress.

Yeah, these are pretty solid advice, would say that you should be safe with patch version updates, like from 1.17.1 to 1.17.4

Should be able to jump from 1.17.4 to 2.0.1 and from 2.0.1 to 2.1.3, etc. going straight to the last patch of the next version, but should go one by one minor version, paying close attention to those versions that have breaking changes in the release notes. And always backup and test before each version jump.

This probably is the issue, when you download a script or binary from the internet it doesn’t have execution permission, you would have to right click on folder to open in terminal (that way don’t have to cd to it), and check permissions with ls -la if it doesn’t have permission, change it with chmod

In my mind it would be super useful, I could sync my photos when my PC is on and when is off rely on my local photos only since my main goal is having a backup of them.

You could do this perfectly with the docker version, so just curiosity here, why not user docker?

Is it because you don’t want to install docker for only Immich? (you could also install other selfhosted server/apps as bonus),

would you be against snap? As someone already mentioned, there is a snap version.

If the important thing is having backups of your photos, there are alternative apps with different packaging formats.

You could make a request for flatpak, and see if other users also would like it, but you would have to wait for feedback from devs and understand if they don’t have the resources or willingness to maintain it.

Am I crazy or it makes sense?

If I’m interested in a specific app, I see what packaging formats it has and see how to install it and try it out. Only if I’m having issues with it (that can’t be solved), or can’t run it on my specific distro with the available packaging formats, I try to suggest/request a different format.

• Not everyone that uses Linux is against proprietary software or only uses FOSS.
• There are people that just heard of Linux, are just trying it out, or have an issue, and already use Reddit, or is what the search engine points them to go for help, or to ask questions.
• Reddit has a lot more reach for the common people than any other platform at the moment, there are still people that prefer to ask on Reddit, than go to a specific forum or another platform to ask (If I remember right, it still happens with some apps like Jellyfin that moved out of Reddit, but people still ask there)

These are just a few of the reasons that come to my mind.

As far as I know, CasaOS (same as Cockpit) is installed on top of a default OS install, so you could always access the OS directly to install/configure things outside of it, if the need arises.

I would not say you would be held back by it, if it does what you need. And for what I can see online, you can install any docker container even if it’s not on the default catalog of CasaOS, or access the OS.

If you want to grow your knowledge of how things work, or how to deploy services without CasaOS, you can always do so in parallel of using CasaOS, so I don’t see where the issue could be.

What would you recommend that is not NixOS or a Bash script and can be used agnostic of distro?

This is not correct as pass uses GPG, and you can do symmetric encryption with it, it is just a different parameter in the command.

You can use a different password per file, or the same one

I use qtpass as a GUI for pass

Can I use it fully offline?

Yes, it is fully offline, you can back it up by any mean you could any other file, and it should be fine as the files are encrypted (should store the keys separated), can be a USB, an external drive, another computer in your LAN, a git repo, nextcloud, syncthing.

How do I back it up to USB drive?

You copy and paste the files

What does the day-to-day operation of Pass compared to Keepass look like?

As I said I use qtpass as a GUI so, open qtpass, search for the specific password file, double click, put the password for my gpg key and then the password I need is stored in clipboard for 30sec (this is customizable or can be disabled) and I paste it where I need it.

If I need to store a new password, just use the add password button, and input the data, it is that simple.

I’m going to mention Ansible as I haven’t seen it mentioned, and it can be used to locally manage a reproducible build.

It has already been mentioned, but as a minimum to replicate your system you need two things:

• Transfer/copy your entire /home directory as there is where the majority of the configuration files of your system pertaining the software you use (there could be configs you could need on /etc and on /usr/local or other dir), that is why it is recommended to partition your disk on installation of your distro, so the /home directory is already separated, as if you reinstall in the same machine you don’t lose any configuration in addition to your personal documents/pictures/etc
• Have a way to automatically install a list of programs/apps/drivers/libraries, and that is what something like a bash script, Ansible, nixOs, etc. could help you with.

The truth is that using any of the tools in the second point requires learning a bunch, so if your skill level is still not there, there is some work to do to get there.

Old laptop, Debian with docker running nextcloud, navidrome, jellyfin, gitea, librespeed, wireguard, dnsmasq, and nginx as a reverse proxy.

I recommend DuckDNS as well, you can run it both sides and set up a daemon to update the domain when there is an IP change automatically.

And with Wireguard you can set up a tunnel between both locations so you can share anything you need.