Last month, but that’s cuz I’m an idiot still stuck with Nvidia drivers

That’s too bad. It was great for use as a root fs on VMware when you had an unreliable NFS storage. Kept every VM from needing an FSCK on recovery.

Social media was not a mistake, it’s a deliberate calculated attack on historical norms of communication and relationship building. A tool to make a deliberate shift from those with fewer but more meaningful relationships to drive change, to utilizing the power of minimally informed crowds turned into mobs that do your bidding.

Qubes OS

3 words: Gravis PC Gamepad

Depends on what threat you’re protecting against IMHO.

If you’re trying to be anonymous, connecting to your home IP first is a dead giveaway to who you are. Both your home ISP and whichever ISP you’re connnected to will know.

Only easy way to maintain some anonymity right now would be to use Tailscale’s Mullvad integration……Tailscale to connect your servers, Mullvad for anonymize/country changing.

Other way might be to ONLY use Tailscale/Mullvad, and set up an alternative auth front door to your own network. Complicated and doesn’t work as nicely tho.

How small are these devices? I think the other problem is that neither BTRFS nor zfs really are suitable for removable devices, and definitely not for ones smaller than probably 8Gb at the very least.

Unlike NTFS which is just a file system, both BTRFS and ZFS do volume management too, so it’s not just a single partition thing; they prefer to take over an entire volume and manage everything.

So while they’re the closest filesystem with NTFS-like transparent compression……they don’t match exactly.

I also hazard to guess if the devices you’re using are too small to accept a BTRFS formatted volume, no amount of compression is going to be enough to fit what you need.

If you just want to play with a bunch of small old devices……maybe play with LVM and small RAID arrays and configurations instead. You can the build a bigger volume out of a bunch of those disks together and then put a BTRFS or zfs volume on them. Can be fun to experiment and learn with anyway.

The equivalent would be either zfs or btrfs compression. Transparent to applications, you don’t have to do anything special other than enable it.