I host it as a docker container and the maintenance has been painless

I self-host https://woodpecker-ci.org/ and I love it. It was easy to set up, and I never have to worry about CI/CD minutes.

Homebox is great, I bought a usb label maker specifically for it

There are always more cool tricks and great plugins out there, have fun!

Also I’d recommend Neovim, it’s exactly like vim except it supports Lua scripting, so there are lots of powerful plugins that aren’t available on vanilla vim.

I’m not familiar with btrbk specifically, but my backups all send a ping to https://healthchecks.io/ when they start and when they finish. healthchecks.io works by getting a simple curl request, similar to ntfy, but if that request doesn’t happen after a certain amount of time (or if you do a start request and a succeed/fail request and the job is taking too long) then it will notify you. It can use ntfy for notifications, but it can also send emails or use any of a number other services.

Seconding radicale, I’ve been using it for over a year and it’s been rock solid. I can’t say the same about NextCloud, it seemed to break every update and was slow as hell. I moved to SyncThing and never looked back.

Absolutely, they take their market cap for granted and have been making the user experience worse for years. I’m a pretty technical person so I switched to Linux for fun and software developer clout, but I’m so glad that the Linux desktop experience is getting good enough for everybody. I’ve had mostly an “it just works” experience on the major distros like Mint and Fedora, and honestly even the issues I’ve run into were simple enough to solve with some internet searches.

My condolences for the Windows issues. I hope you have a great time with Mint, that was my first daily-driver Linux distro. These days I seem to have fewer issues running games than my friends running Windows, and I hope it’s the same for you.