Dipped my toes into Linux maybe 10 years ago. It was awful and turned me off of it. Also the fact that I occasionally have to deal with some bespoke bullshit distro at work that does nothing that literally any tutorial I google says it will.
But I finally gave it another shot. Girlfriend got a smart TV. I got sick of ads. I had an old Intel nuc laying around that I bought for a dedicated DDR machine but it didn’t go great, so I stuck dietpi and pihole on it. Was still a mild clusterfuck and had dozens of open tabs trying to figure out what was breaking, but by 5am I had pihole configured and running, a plex server set up, and a desktop. Today I got the ftp server up so I can move stuff into plex without messing with flash drives. Still haven’t figured out desktop through ssh but that’s a later problem.
Bad news is youtube ads come from the same domain as the videos so pihole is useless there, but I’m still having fun and very excited about what I can do with a cheap piece of hardware I thought was useless. For the next project I’m thinking maybe trying to de-google my Google home minis and have a locally hosted assistant, but that would probably take a ton of research beforehand.
Suggestions, encouragement, and harassment welcome.
Raspberry Pi is IMO an excellent tool for learning Linux (particularly CLI, you honestly don’t need a UI for the computer itself) in a low risk environment while also allowing you to build some really useful services (NAS, Pi-Hole, media-server).
Mine runs basically everything in my apartment (Home Assistant), I dumped my antique Synology DiskStation and run Samba + an array of hard drives for NAS (synced offsite of course).
I was a bit leery of running NAS on top of everything else, but this is a Raspberry Pi 4 with a ton of services running on it and it’s still pretty idle. arm64 is a powerhouse (my router is a nanoPi R6S too). Also for context I run Alpine Linux so it’s as barebones as I need it to be.