Ideally you have backups of backups, right? Like putting an SD card in your phone, or a second HDD in your computer. Then the “cloud” part…my recommendation, considering you asked for simplest, is a NAS. Get a user-friendly one with built in apps that can do what you’re asking, and you shouldn’t have issues

Then I get a “SocketTimeoutError”

I’m sorry in advance, but I don’t know how to answer the first two questions…I’m using whichever protocol is default for Win11 (SMB2, I think). I’ve been trying to find the folder through an automated scan, then plugging the hostname and address in myself when nothing comes up

So I have all of the devices connected through TailScale (for remote media server access) with a Pihole DNS. All of that works as intended, and my computers can share files between each other, but folders shared across my network aren’t visible on my phone for some reason. The file manager that was recommended to me most recently was Material Files, but it isn’t detecting my shared folders and plugging in the SMB info myself leads to a vague error.

I’ll try CX and report back

“Could not log in to xxx.xxx.x.xxx with user xxxx” but my info is correct, copied and pasted to be sure

As in, which file managers have I tried?

Really? I bought a Death Adder back in…2011? Or '12, maybe. And it JUST started to fail me, still works, but sometimes double-clicks for no reason. I was actually gonna get another one too

Weird, I’m telling ya I’ve had MANY comments disappear

I’ve had many comments (and I know a few others have too) quietly deleted for talking about the downsides of Linux, so mild censorship is definitely a thing depending on where you visit. But “shadow banning”, if I’m not mistaken, is kinda nonexistent on a platform like this

What generalization? You mean the widely accepted pain that comes from it?

I respect your opinion, but I’ll pass

You nailed it, the problem is the problem with having to troubleshoot by yourself as a newbie. Once might not be an issue, but every step feels like a new instance of a repeat problem. Thanks for the encouragement

How so?

I haven’t installed it yet, but that sounds exactly like what I had in mind. Is it limited by which companies have adopted it?

I apologize for not being more specific, I’m not interested in a centralized delivery system. I just want vendors to have their inventories posted online (as usual), but for them to be aggregated by category and filterable in one location without depending on a dystopian tech company. MAYBE have a frontend to appear as though everything is centralized, but I would be indifferent

Trust me, you don’t want to get instructions from me. Just look at my post/comment history haha everything I touch breaks in ways that are hard to diagnose. I had to reach out to tech support, they got back to me in <12hrs

Second on that. The whole “it just works” slogan was frustrating when it didn’t work at first, but once it finally for running it was great

I like the idea and I appreciate pushing efficiency as far as one can, but looking at that makes me feel like I’d get frustrated just getting the OS to boot properly

Holy shit, that’s genius. I saved your comment for reference. This is probably how I’ll end up learning to make these things work

In my limited experience, that’s pretty accurate unfortunately. But with so many Debian tools becoming more popular, I bet that attitude will change soon

Can you give me some case use examples for VMs like that? My VM knowledge stops at emulating OSs for software compatibility and running old Windows versions for gaming.