No offense taken. With AI-generated texts becoming ever more pervasive, you’re right to be suspicious. 👍 I get that the bullet-point-ish style of my OP gives people ChatGPT vibes. 🤖

I could give you a run-down of ten tell-tale signs of AI writing style if you like. 🔎

Now make it playable via steering wheel and accelerator. Bonus points for linking “fire” to the car horn.

I know of these famed Nvidia driver problems, but they’re

a) not exclusive to Ubuntu; Nvidia is the party fucking up here, so they’re rumoured to be unstable throughout all distros and
b) I’ve been running Debian-/Ubuntu-based Linux distros w/ Nvidia’s proprietary drivers for about 10 years now, and I haven’t come across a single issue with it in all that time.

So. Well. That’s anecdotal evidence against anecdotal evidence, I guess.

But there’s people out there! (shudders)

I’m not an LLM and I don’t use any for writing my postings, if that’s what you’re getting at. ;)

If you want a good first Linux experience, stick with anything Ubuntu-/Debian-based; they are

• stable workhorses, i.e. they don’t break on you as easily as rolling release distros like CachyOS.
• wildly popular, i.e. you’ll find plenty of resources to help you get started (although, to be fair, the Arch wiki is also ridiculously detailed).

Whatever you do, steer clear of immutable distros like Bazzite for now. As cool as the concept is (I run Bazzite on my gaming machine) - as soon as you do something “non-standard” (and modding your Minecraft .jar with Optifine already qualifies as such), you’ll have to fiddle with the terminal and distrobox containers, both of which will be alien concepts for you at the start and may be top much to make it a good first impression.

A Booklore fork! Yes, that does make sense, since Grimmory’s commits oddly start with v 2.x.x

It does not, however, change my outlook much. Booklore, too, was a very young project (initial commit: March 2025) and heavily vibecoded by a handful of people.

Grimmory sounds like a new kid on the block, and indeed, it is. I’ve looked into it, and here’s what I’ve come up with:

• initial commit: March 2026 --> very young project, blazed through 24 releases already
• 165 contributors, but upon closer inspection, it relies on only two frequent contributors --> if they lose interest, the project might fall dormant or die entirely
• as per its AI policy, the project embraces AI as a tool, but expects contributors to understand what they’re committing, and reserves the right to throw out blatantly vibecoded contributions. --> Whether two people can actually enforce this policy when getting firehosed with AI contributions remains to be seen.

With all that in mind, I think I’ll give this project a pass for now. Like you said, it’s some work that goes into curating a library and making sure the metadata is correct, and if that locks me into a project that may or may not exist several months or years from now, I’ll probably stick to one of the more established projects with a higher likelihood of long-term maintenance.

Feel free to elaborate. ;) I don’t mind ditching folders. The question is: how do I get at said metadata with the least amount of manual effort, how do I make sure that it’s accurate (sifting through thousands of files is not fun), and how is the metadata stored - particularly so that does not lock me into one application that can only understand its own metadata scheme, and once it dies or I want to switch to a different one, I lose all the work I’ve put into curating my collection. That’s why I was considering folders as an option: they are a software-agnostic way of organising my library.

That sounds reasonable. So you’re essentially throwing everything into one folder and let software do the rest? May I ask what software you’re using, and how it stores your tags? Does it use metadata files or a database?

Hi there,

thanks for not staying true to your username. ;)

[let the LLM] apply metadata to the file

How does this work in practice? I’ve got a bunch of .pdf, .epub, .txt, even some .doc files lying around in a folder. What would an LLM do to them? Write a bunch of .xml files with a file name identical to the corresponding book, or what?

Lemmy put it like this: free courses in self-defence are cool and all. But do they really have to be organised by the town’s serial sex offender?

I’ve got your exact setup:

• running immich (and other services with valuable data) at home (on OMV!)
• backup server at family member’s house
• regular backups from here to there through Wireguard tunnel with Borgbackup

AMA!

I don’t want a compromised device on the family member’s network to compromise mine

If with “mine” you mean the pi Zero, I wouldn’t worry too much about that. Just configure the pi’s firewall to drop all traffic from the LAN (they have no business with this device anyway), except any incoming traffic from the router on the Wireguard port.

Immich is entirely free and open-source software and got a grant from the FUTO Foundation, which is fiercely pro privacy. As such, it does not engage in any data sharing. Development is financed through the grant and purchases of the server licence (I got one; it’s ridiculously good software).

Ah! I use virt-manager + qemu on desktop Linux, mainly to try things and and contain dodgy software (Windows). I didn’t know it was commonly used on headless servers. Thanks for pointing that out!

I’m self-hosting immich (with ML-based facial recognition, semantic search and OCR) and psiTTSa, an offline text-to-speech engine.

(Prob not the answer you were looking for, but a reminder that “AI” is more than just LLMs.)

Thanks for your detailed reply and expertise! I really appreciate it!

First question you have to ask yourself is so what?

You’re right to call out my lack of threat modeling. I am aware that the “cost” of what I’m planning here likely outweighs the actual risks. That’s a deliberate choice though: one of my objectives in homelabbing is to “learn how the big guys do it”, i.e. learning and implementing, bit by bit, networking and security best practices.

That said,

• all of my drives are (LUKS) encrypted (although this will only help against evil maid attacks physically stealing my disks, since data is only encrypted at rest, not while the server is in operation)
• I do have some CPU monitoring in place
• I have applied the principle of least privilege (as far as I can see at least)
• I have set up an off-site backup server running (although I need to improve automation and deduplication; I’ll probably go with Borg here)

Thank you also for pointing me towards OWASP Docker cheat sheet! I didn’t know this resource yet, although I seem to have found others that said the same thing. I already have in place:

• no docker socket exposed to services
• user set for every service that didn’t give me a headache doing that (some assume root and won’t accept setting a user)
• username remapping is active
• all containers have their caps dropped and selectively only put those back in which they need
• I expose almost no container ports, and only those necessary; instead, communication with the containers is handled on my reverse proxy’s network (i.e. via the internal docker network)
• privilege escalation is disabled

I have played around with rootless docker (again, stubborn containers assuming root prevented me from going all-in) and considered Podman, although just putting containers in a VM looks like a more frictionless route to me.

All things considered, your advice seems to be:

1. to first consider whether I actually need all this security. I really don’t, yet I want to learn how to set it up anyway.
2. to first explore and all other hardening avenues. I have, to a certain degree, and beyond that run into brick walls.

If I might exhaust a little more of your time, I’d be curious how you judge the next step I’ve suggested: splitting duties between separate servers, thus segmenting public from private physically, or going the virtual route (again, by splitting into a public and a private VM and separate them through strict software firewalling).

I still use separate user accounts for different purposes with heavily restrictive permissions.

Good call, that’s an even more effective first line of defense! (I have, however, already implemented it. ;)

Thanks for your input. It is correct that a lot of ISPs/consumer grade hardware is poorly maintained. Mine is a rare exception, however: I’m running an AVM FritzBox, which are somewhat famous for still receiving updates even after 10+ years on the market. They have only recently pushed a security update my way, so I’m good enough on that front - for now.

I shall consider a firewall in the future though.

I hope part of your hardening SSH is changing the port number!

I used to do that, but then realised that doing so will do very little. Scanning all possible ports is a matter of seconds, and SSH (unlike Wireguard) will signal to a potential attacker that it’s listening on port X instead of just remaining silent. In other words: in my eyes, it’s security by obscurity and will have very little effect.

What I have done to harden SSH is:

• set up pubkey authentication and disable password authentication
• disable root login
• not expose my SSH port publicly; it is accessible only from my LAN and through Wireguard

I have also tried out IP whitelisting (which may harden my setup against attacks from the LAN), but found it may be overkill for now. I might turn it back on just for shits and giggles.