You can get Steam on just about any distro, for years at this point. And there’s always Flatpak for these cases too although for Steam I recommend native packages.

You’re not wrong, it’s definitely not something a n00b should attempt in most cases. But I’ve done this before to save myself the need for distrobox. A lot of proprietary software only offers .deb, but is usually either statically linked or comes with its own set of nearly all the libraries it needs. So just extracting and running it often does the trick on non-debian distros like Fedora in my case.

Seriously though, just use distrobox or see if there’s an unofficial package for your distro that you trust (AUR/copr/ppa/OBS). It’s more straight forward especially if you don’t know what you’re doing.

That’ll work but distrobox is a much simpler solution

My home server is a RockPro64. I didn’t specifically buy it for that purpose but since I had it lying around I figured I might as well use it.

It has a PCIe Slot which I used for a SATA controller, with two 3,5" HDDs.

They have an official NAS case for it too, not sure I’d recommend it as it’s kind of expensive, doesn’t isolate HDD vibration / noise at all and isn’t very convenient to service (to replace the drives for instance). I’m not aware of a better case option for this board though.

I run debian and OpenMediaVault on it (I didn’t have to mess with the kernel or device tree at all), with the ZFS plugin, and several docker containers (Jellyfin, PiHole, Syncthing, Tailscale).

For my needs it’s working perfectly fine and doesn’t need much power. But:

• It isn’t particularly great at video transcoding
• 4GB of RAM isn’t a ton especially with ZFS, keep that in mind if you wish to run more / heavier services such as Nextcloud
• being ARM based, this board basically limits you to OMV or manually setting up stuff on Linux through the CLI, as TrueNAS, Unraid and Proxmox only support x86. OMV is fine for it’s core functionality and you can get some more advanced features through plugins, but at that point it often gets kind of janky and annoying compared to e. g. TrueNAS. Also, the KVM plugin apparently doesn’t work on ARM.

TL;DR these low power ARM boards are just fine as a cheap option for getting into homelab / Self hosting and I wouldn’t necessarily recommend against them, but sooner or later I want to build a low power x86 based NAS with more RAM, SSD cache and TrueNAS Scale instead.

Reminds me of this…

Sometimes I’ll randomly remember a joke or funny situation from years ago and suddenly grin or laugh about it again. Then people ask me what’s so funny and I can’t really explain.

I don’t use Wine so I’m really not sure if this would be prevented

It is not prevented. In fact I saw a video where someone removed the Z:\ drive for wine (the path that gives windows apps access to the whole Linux rootfs) and then ran Wannacry, and it was somehow still able to encrypt all writable folders on the system.

That wouldn’t remove the Wine prefix, i. e. the virtual C:\ drive where the virus most likely lives. Uninstalling Wine wouldn’t do shit since it only removes files that your user (and thus wine) can’t even write to, and if a virus manages to get around that you have bigger problems.

The fact that it’s a screen recording of MS Paint really sells it