I'm doing my first playthrough on Explorer mode and I'm pretty OP. I am terrible at these games. Compared to DOS:2 the game is a breeze, truly. I could probably bump the difficulty up to Balanced mode and still be fine.

In other words, the combat is much more accessible than DOS:2 in my opinion.

Pop!_OS on my laptop for everything except gaming. Programming, media consumption, reading, etc. I am much more productive using their stupid simple tiling window manager.

On my servers/cloud VM's I run Ubuntu Server.

On my NAS I run TrueNAS Scale. To be completely honest I kind of regret "upgrading" from TrueNAS to TrueNAS Scale. It's less performant and the amount of issues I've had with their application setup made me completely abandon it and just run Docker on a separate computer, which defeated the entire purpose of installing Scale. I'm sure they'll iron everything out over time and it's not like the performance is horrendous, it's just incomparable to good ol' regular TrueNAS (based on BSD instead of Linux with great ZFS support).

This post got me to try out selfoss but after it being pretty buggy and unable to fetch 50% of the feeds I was interested in, I looked elsewhere. I wanted to install Tiny Tiny RSS but the instructions weren't my thing. Finally, I settled on FreshRSS and I love it. All the feeds work. The only complaint I have is that, at least it seems, you need to manually add labels to each article and instead just put a feed under a category. I wish I could put feeds under any amount of labels or categories I want. Maybe there's an extension for it that I have not seen yet.

I use Roon ARC to self-host my library. It is paid, but, I bought the lifetime subscription because there is really no other music app that has the features Roon has.

Other than that, I have HiBy R3 Pro that is useless for Bluetooth, and when I'm hiking I want Bluetooth.

The pictures folder on my instance is at 1.3GB after two days. It's just me and my friend. About how many communities are you subscribed to?

Happy to help! Trilium is really awesome, just the web based view/syncing with it's desktop app is a killer feature. If I lose internet for a second and I'm using the app it syncs the next time I'm connected and open it. A lot of the more "hidden" stuff and things you need to install plugins for in Obsidian come by default in Trilium as well.

• Lemmy Instance
• VaultWarden - Password manager
• Jellyfin - Movies/TV Shows
• Roon / Roon ARC - Music
• OneDev - Used to use Gitlab but couldn't afford the self-hosted instance anymore and want the paid features, which this mostly has.
• Dokuwiki - Used to use as a wiki, switched to...
• Trilium - Similar to Obsidian but open source.
• Kavita - Comics/books
• TubeArchivist - YouTube video downloader/viewer
• PodGrab - Podcast manager
• Wallabag - Website article saver/bookmarker etc. If anyone has a better suggestion for FOSS bookmark management please let me know!
• Mealie - Recipe manager (grabs recipes from a ton of different sites)

I use TrueNAS Scale for my NAS and Ubuntu server for my VM's/home server. I probably am forgetting something, but, that's what's listed in my Portainer :).

Sorry didn't mean to post here, Lemmy bug changed the post I'm on...

I used to have no interest in pixel-style games but in the past few years I've grown to really like them. I'll try and post some of my favorites below with a quick synopsis to see if it's something you may like. These are really in no particular order. As you can see, I really like the building/colony management games. I hope to delve into other genres at some point when they interest me.

Also, a lot will be in early access but I'll note when there hasn't been updates for a while.

Building/colony simulation

• Cult of the Lamb - you play an endearing and cute lamb that needs to start a cult in order to gain favor and allow your colony to thrive. You do this by going through rogue-lite dungeon levels and defeating enemies/bosses to recruit more followers and continue the story campaign. Includes some mini-games like fishing and a card game and I'm sure more. They just released a big update that I have yet to check out.
• Dwarf Fortress - One of the most complex colony simulators to date. You take the good with the bad. The UI has seen improvements in their recent Steam release but it's still, at least in my opinion, not the most intuitive thing. If you are into this genre of game, though, you absolutely need to check this out and put in the time to learn the systems. You start the game by having it simulate your world's history given some seed data. After it's done, you can view every single action taken to see how the world got to this point (even seemingly useless stuff like Goblin Terry bought a tavern in Randomtown or whatever). Don't sleep on it!
• RimWorld - heavily inspired by Dwarf Fortress, it's basically that but in a sci-fi setting instead of a medieval one. While the interface by default is, in my opinion, better than Dwarf Fortress's, it still requires quite a time-sink to get accustomed to. There are an incredible amount of mods on the Steam workshop that makes the variability and replayability seemingly endless.
• Clanfolk - RimWorld style game based in old Irish lore. Still in early stages but their testing branch is very frequently updated.
• Stardeus - Think RimWorld except you're an AI on a broken down ship with a bunch of travelers in stasis. You need to repair the ship, get the systems working again, and improve everything over time. The developer is insanely active, with seemingly daily updates. For a while they were streaming all of their development on Twitch. I don't know if they're still doing it, but, it doesn't matter; he's still updating the game at a ridiculous rate. It has full modding support as well but there are far less of them at the moment since the game is in early access and much newer.
• Songs of Syx - Alright, this game is kind of nuts. Instead of managing one colony like in Dwarf Fortress and RimWorld, your goal is to manage a large part of the rendered world. It has a lot of the same building elements as the other games but takes it to another level. Also, it's medieval style and has magic. You really should not sleep on this if this sounds interesting. Obligatory warning: yes, it has a massive learning curve and things aren't well documented. There are some good guides on YouTube, though.
• Oxygen Not Included - Similar to RimWorld systems and mechanics wise with a completely different look and feel. It's too complicated for me right now to look into much but I need to mention it as it's insanely popular.
• Core Keeper - A completely different game this time. In this, you actually control a single character in top-down view. There are multiple different biomes that you move on from by defeating bosses. It's like Stardew Valley with much more focus on combat and it takes place underground.
• Keplerth - I'll be honest, I couldn't get into it, but, I've seen posts here and there about people loving it so I thought I'd just include it in the list.
• Necesse - Again, haven't played it much, but, if you know about the game Terraria it seemingly tries to improve on those systems.
• Realms of Magic - In the same vein as the previous two, but, my favored one. It has basic story elements, complex building and crafting, and a pretty cool map system. If the Terraria-style game looks nice to you but you want more, check this out.
• PixARK - Officially licensed pixel style ARK: Survival Evolved clone. It feels a lot easier and I enjoy it more. The issue I have with it is that updates got really slow for a while. They seemed to have picked up again recently so maybe it was just a temporary thing, not sure. Quickly looking at the patch notes, though, there doesn't seem to be many significant updates lately (if at all).

Metroidvania style

• Infernax - From the Steam page: Infernax is the adventures of a great knight who returns to his homeland only to find it plagued with unholy magic. Uncover the mysteries of the curse and face the consequences of your actions.
• Blasphemous - A super dark art style and challenging combat. You play some fucked up angel type thing that's basically on a good-guy crusade. Fight evil, etc. I can't do this justice though, it's legitimately very impressive. A sequel was recently announced.

Dungeon-crawling ARPG

• Chronicon - A bunch of really cool classes and tight combat systems makes this one a favorite.
• The Slormancer - Really awesome (and intuitive) builds with a great art style. You can upgrade pretty much any of the systems in the game (think magic types, health, etc), making it really easy and fun to try out different builds.

It was super easy. I just edited the config file in the Ansible playbook and needed to edit the certbot task because I use Cloudflare but other than that it was a breeze.

Well, as you mentioned before it's to enjoy the "technical aspect", which could be many reasons. For one, if the instance you signed up on shuts down there goes your account with it. I feel better self-hosting because I am in control of when/if it shuts down.

You can set your instance to private and close registrations, which is what I am doing. That way you can use it only for yourself and a few friends and still be connected to the fediverse. The communities that you make on your self-hosted instance wouldn't be connected, though.