I don’t. I migrated to Arch in 2011 or 2012 btw. Fuck I feel old.

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Fugg yeah thanks for the tip!. I was not there for krohnkite the first time around, but I’m here for it now.

Whatever you do, steer clear of Plasma Wayland right now. Polonium has a lot of issues.

I would recommend they follow the full installation guide instead, which is probably one of the best pieces of technical documentation in existence at the moment. The amount of detail, context, and instruction provides both an invaluable learning experience and introduction to Linux.

archinstall is not foolproof; that’s why I wouldn’t recommend it to an absolute beginner. IMHO, It’s more valuable for people who are familiar with the process and want a shortcut.

As great as archinstall is, it can’t possibly account for every contingency. Troubleshooting a bootloader issue, for example, is easy if you’ve installed one before. If a noob managed to navigate the TUI (with all of the confusing questions and settings) and complete the installation only to have something go wrong there, they’re off it, maybe for good.

Two DEs enter the steel cage… Only one will emerge.

Thanks for your time and consideration. I planned a few different builds with an N100, but everything priced out way more than I wanted to spend, even without drives. I saw this server for $80 on FB marketplace, and that was that.

RAID1 is only for the Proxmox installation, them I will use ZFS for the block storage.

Thank you for your insights and suggestions. Very glad I didn’t buy anything yet. There appear to be a number of PCIe options for using both SATA or NVMe, but I’ve decided to get a couple of smaller, cheap 2.5 SATA SSDs just for the OS.

The plan is to just have Proxmox installed RAID1 on the two SSDs for redundancy, then the real data array is 4x12tb HGST in some ZFS configuration. Does this seem sane?

That’s some super user dough

I’d recommend just scripting with rsync commands and run with cron or whatever scheduling automation. Backup locally to an external drive or orchestrate with cloud provider cli tools for something like S3.

There are some tools that probably assist with this, but it’s just very few moving parts to roll your own. Clonezilla seems overkill and harder to automate, but I will admit I’m not an expert with it.

I have Arch on a 2013 mbp and it has served very well for years. I think I had to do a little work getting the backlight controls bound to some hotkey combos, but that might depend more on DE than distro. I’m probably going to put NixOS on it, since I’m not using it as my work laptop anymore. Use whatever you want! Debian is always a pleasure, too, in my experience.