If your distro can’t be forked into a “beginner distro” then it’s fundamentally flawed IMHO.
To be clear, I’ve used Arch as my daily drivers for a while, and while it’s not the best fit for my needs (I use Debian mostly), there’s nothing that I experienced that was incompatible with a “beginner” distro.
You can also drop cache for debugging by running something like echo 3 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/drop-caches
But remember that the kernel knows best — this RAM will automatically be freed up when needed and you should never run this except for debugging (or maybe benchmarking).
I have one SSID with pihole (which I use), and one without. Works pretty well, if you’re ok with a VLAN-aware network.
I’ve been super happy with it. Knock on wood it’s been super reliable. I have a single ZFS drive, take snapshots with various retention policies, nothing fancy.
Another fun thing is to set up a reverse proxy on it as an endpoint for services on your local (home) network which can only be accessed by VPN. For example, my Jellyfin service isn’t public facing, but I didn’t want e.g. my parents to need to set up WireGuard. So instead they can point their TV to a raspberry pi on their network to access the service — even a first gen RPI can handle Jellyfin reverse proxy over WireGuard for moderate bitrates!
WireGuard, and an external HDD. Run at a remote location for off-site backup.
I do this with a raspberry pi 3 at the in-laws. I copied the data over locally before setting it up, and after that it’s just nightly incremental rsync, which is fine even over my slow (35Mbps) upload.
We tend to use between 3kWh (vacation/idle power consumption) and around 8kWh per day. If we switched to electric stove, water heater, and heat pump, and add a hot tub, that’d increase substantially. But if we added solar (on our long Todo list…), the battery in the article (60kWh) would probably be able to handle all our storage needs, and it’d fit in he garage (bonus of it can be placed outside/under a deck!). I live in a major city, but I would absolutely love to effectively be off grid.
Exciting stuff — it seems these are touted as being extremely robust/safe, which is of course important for me if it’s going to be in/near our house. Storage density not a huge concern, but price is somewhat important — let’s hope this sort of thing ticks all the boxes.
Haha yeah that was the counter example I was thinking of. I agree completely — you could make a Gentoo from source beginner distro, and I think you could make it reasonably “idiot proof,” but it would still be a bad user experience most likely (too much time spent compiling).