drhoopoe

I wouldn’t mind there being a whole community devoted to pointing out shit that is poorly designed or just broken

But isn’t that every linux forum?

Yep, I’ve got a stack of 5-10 year old optiplexes (optiplexi?) running proxmox.

Yes, you can use it fully offline.

To back it up I believe you’d just need to backup your .pass and .gnupg directories.

I haven’t used keepass, but the entry from the archwiki should give you a good idea of usage, and it also lists some helper apps: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Pass

You say this machine is headless. Is it at a remote location? If not, is it feasible to connect it to a monitor an keyboard for a few minutes? If so then you could logout, switch DE, and then log back in. That would hopefully set the DE you prefer as user default.

If that’s not possible, then some of the solutions discussed here might be applicable.

I’m a college professor in the humanities (religious studies, history). Got into linux about 5 years back, partly because it comports better with my lefty politics than the alternatives, but also just because I’ve long been a closet computer nerd. I currently run a couple of proxmox servers on old optiplexes I grabbed off ebay. Full *arr stack with jellyfin on docker, a Tails VM for TOR stuff, NAS (omv on a vm), some other dockerized stuff: linkding, radicale, alexandrite (a self-hosted lemmy client, which I’m currently writing this on), various backup utilities.

It’s basically just a hobby for me, though the switch to linux has also totally changed my academic workflow, e.g. I do all my writing in nvim + latex now, use syncthing to sync my home desktop, laptops, and office computer, etc. I dig divesting myself from corporate computing to the greatest extent possible, appreciate the privacy benefits, and generally just enjoy the community-driven spirit of the whole thing.

I mostly use debian + docker or alpine + docker for this kind of thing (usually running as VMs on a proxmox server). Both are utterly reliable in my experience, though I’ve been tending more often toward alpine these days, because it’s just so light and simple. I haven’t tried any of the immutable systems, in the general spirit of why fix what’s not broken. I don’t even bother with snapshotting either, though that’s mostly because I use some of the proxmox tools for backing up the VMs.

I work for a large state university and run linux on my office machine, despite the fact the IT office dept doesn’t officially support it. I told our IT guy once what I’m doing and his response was, “cool.” Of course I’m totally on my own if anything goes wrong. It helps that I’m a prof and most of my on-campus work doesn’t involve much time on a computer, aside from basic web and documents stuff. tldr, in my case I’m able to just do it without asking anyone’s permission, and it’s worked out great for several years now, but a lot of jobs aren’t like that obviously.

I love linkding, couldn’t live without it.

I’ve used herbstluftwm on my main desktop for years. Love it. Manual tiling works well for me. Totally flexible and customizable. Switch between floating and tiling with a keypress, etc.

And then on various other machines.

• Xfce on my desktop at work that I don’t use that much (work mainly from home) and just needed to set up quick. It’s totally fine, like xfce always is.
• Gnome on my tablet (basically a Surface knock-off). I don’t really like gnome, but it’s the only thing I’ve tried that works well OOTB for a touchscreen.
• PekWM on an old macbook running debian. Great stacking WM. Super flexible, and the tabbed windows for any app are cool.
• LXQT on an ancient (2009?) dual-core laptop that I mainly just use for writing in nvim. Works well for a simple setup.

You have to enable it, but once you do it can do them automatically.

Linux Mint Debian Edition. Very windows-like + automatic updates = ideal for people who don’t really want to have to learn anything new (assuming your parents are like mine in that respect).

I’ve been using tmsu for years to manage thousands of pdfs and images for my academic research.

It can be set up to work with a webdav database. So yes, you could self-host the database and access it from clients with local zotero installs.