(Personal opinion not based on scientific evidence.)

I would say that’s not possible for a hobbyist. The main issues with this kind of DIY phones are performance, compatibility with existing software, and most importantly battery life.

The Raspberry Pi was never designed to be used with a small battery while still staying connected to the internet to receive notifications all the time, like a smartphone. If you want to build a usable smartphone you will need an efficient co-processor to do these tasks. This could get complicated fast unless you use a CPU designed for this job.

There has been some interesting progress with desktop environments and small touch screens. Still nothing as good as Android, but nice UI is no longer the main issue imho.

As for compatibility, good luck running Signal, Matrix and Thunderbird in the background without draining the battery.

That being said, if you are just doing it as an excercise without expecting to build a device that will replace your main phone, you can definitely give it a try. Have fun and learn much!

Ah! Sorry for the textdump, and thanks for the feedback. I’ll keep it in mind in the future.

Sorry, not an answer to your exact question… Dockge might be the answer if you need a web UI to manage Docker containers.

If you need something more specific, like a button dashboard to run custom commands, perhaps you could build your own with Vite (Node.js). You will need to understand basic HTML, CSS and JavaScript. (EDIT: OliveTin makes more sense.)

As for authentication, you could configure a basic authentication on your favourite reverse proxy (such as Nginx), or look for something more advanced such as OIDC/OAuth2 through Keycloak.

In that case I would say start with a Debian-based or Ubuntu-based distro of your choice. Ubuntu-based distros are also Debian-based, since Ubuntu is Debian-based. Mint is Ubuntu-based so it’s a good choice imho. Mint should work pretty well for backups and Minecraft.

As a counter-example, Mint would (probably) be a poor choice if you want to turn that PC into a router or a DNS server, but sounds like that’s not what you have in mind.

If you plan to Install more stuff in the near future, you could optionally look into containerization (Docker) which would allow you to someday swap Mint with another distro when you decide that you feel like changing. All of this, without having to reconfigure anything. Portainer might be a good soft-entry to Docker if you don’t love the terminal, it gives you a nice UI. And it’s compatible with Mint, ofc.

As for the fedi instance, it’s a good exercise, you will learn a lot about networks. Personally I tried installing a Lemmy instance too, but I ended up turning it off as I realized that it didn’t make sense for my use case. It just wasted bandwidth to stay in-sync with the rest of the fediverse.

It depends. What do you plan to use it for? Depending on the answer, perhaps Mint might not be the best option, but I can share my personal experience.

My use case is a headless server running OCI containers through rootless Podman (this is Docker’s modern equivalent). I’ve been running this on Linux Mint on a compact PC for a few years. I enabled unattended upgrades, and once in a while I VNC into it and upgrade Mint itself. I also installed a CRON job to reboot automatically every few days. So far I’ve not encountered any major issues.

Euro-Office and Office EU (office.eu) are not the same project.

How does Euro-Office compare to IONOS Workspace, office.eu, the Proton productivity suite, Nextcloud Hub or XWiki: Euro-Office is more of an integration component. It merely handles document editing itself. Storage, as well as navigation, permissions and sharing logic has to be offered by a platform it is integrated in, like Proton Docs, Nextcloud Hub or OpenProject. – https://github.com/Euro-Office/.github/blob/main/profile/README.md#faq

As far as I understand, audio cards hold a buffer of the audio that should be played at any time. If the CPU can’t keep up producing new audio, it will loop to the beginning of the buffer. My guess is that when you suspend, the CPU stops producing new data before the audio card stops consuming it. And that’s why you hear the last part for a short instant.

It also happens on my devices, and it’s always happened on all my previous devices as far as I can remember.

Disclaimer: this is based on my understanding + a lot of suppositions. It might not be accurate.

Sorry for being pedantic. I might be dumb, but I don’t see any assets (sprites/models/sounds) in this repository. I think the license you linked might just be referring to the code.

The lack of recent releases isn’t a discriminator for this list. And active development is certainly a plus.

If it’s the official one, yes, that’s what I would recommend anyone to go for.

But keep in mind that integrity checks will still fail even if you go that way.

I use microG on my main phone. I had to set them up myself, and I was told that I could just install them as any regular app through FDroid, but that was not entirely correct.

You can install them through FDroid, open the app, follow instructions, and both location services and notifications will work once all checkboxes in the “Self Test” page will be ticked.

Except that the “microG Services Framework installed” checkbox will never tick no matter what you do. Everything will still work no problem, except that microG will not be able to run privileged actions, in particular it won’t be able to immediately awake sleeping apps when they receive a push notification. This will cause delays with instant messaging apps and other time-sensitive notifications.

I solved all of this by installing through this unofficial installer. The downside is that this will also install some (FOSS) bloatware which you can’t uninstall. But you can disable all the stuff you don’t need, and you will also need to disable it from auto-updating from FDroid otherwise it will re-enable automatically.

You might also be able to find a ROM with microG already installed. If it exists perhaps I would recommend doing that instead.

You might still have some issues with integrity checks unless you install other mods. This might cause issues with some banking apps. You won’t find any official guides to bypass these checks though, as this is a gray area.

Hi, thanks for the suggestions. Unfortunately 0 A.D. is still in beta, so it wouldn’t qualify for this list yet. It’s definitely popular enough to deserve to be in the honorable mentions though, so I will add it.

As for D-Day:Normandy I assume you mean this? I can’t seem to find a license (nor source code actually, but maybe there is no source code as all scripts might have been written manually). I could add it if it’s actually FOSS, but I’d need help about the license and where to find sources.

Ah, that’s a shame, I never really thought about it, but it does make very much sense. I’ll demote but keep the CC BY-NC games in a separate section in this list for now, but I will probably remove them in the future once the list grows enough. Thanks for the pointer!

Hi! Although OpenRA’s source code is free, it depends on proprietary assets, so unfortunately it doesn’t qualify for this list. Still, thanks for the suggestion, CnC and RA were both amazing games!

Added, thanks for the suggestion! They tricked me with the 0.x.x version identifier, but it seems to be a mature/completed project.

SS14 is still in early-access, but fair enough, it’s so popular that it deserves at least to be in the honorable mentions. Thanks for your suggestion!

Hi! Thanks for the suggestion. I can’t quite understand if this project is mature and if it depends on non-free assets. My first question emerges from the fact that they use a 0.x.x version identifier, and the second one from what is says on this page.

Content repository for OA3 is not yet available.

They seem to be a bit more lenient than me. Their list also includes games which depend on non-free assets, as long as the source code is free. Still, I will add this list to the list of lists in the post. Thanks!

The gamescope micro compositor does make games run better. You can obviously run that on others distros as well, but on SteamOS it’s out-of-the-box.

Is SteamOS immutable though? I thought that was just Bazzite.

Thank you a lot, this also seems to be a great list. And it comes with list of lists as well! I will have a deep look and see which games match my criteria.

Hi! Although the engine is free, the game assets seem to be proprietary. Still thanks for sharing the suggestion.