If NVIDIA is significantly better value over AMD in your use case, go team green. If not, I’d go team red and personally I wouldn’t buy NVIDIA just because one day it might be better.
I switched mine to NixOS a while ago. It’s got a steep learning curve, but it’s really nice having the entire server config exist in a handful of files.
@GustavoM@communism I think Alpine is better for a lightweight distro. It's also very minimalist, but without going too bespoke so it's still easy to google a solution.
If you are already familiar with one package manager, pick a distro that also uses that package manager.
When deciding on the release track, the harder it is to recover the system, the more stable the track should be. Stable does not imply secure.
As you move up through virtualization layers, the less stable the track needs to be, allowing access to more recent features.
Steer clear of distros that pride themselves on using musl. It’s historically slow and incomplete. Don’t buy into the marketing.
Think about IaC. Remote management is a lot more comfortable if you can consider your server ephemeral. You’ll appreciate the work on the day you need to upgrade to a new major release of the distro.
Your title is about backups but your question seems mostly just about how to set up your storage for backups.
You can go about pooling disks in a few ways but you first need to define what level of protection from failure you want. Before going further though, how much space do you project that you will need for backups?
one backup would be a bit under 3tb, if I could keep a second copy it would be 6tb. I just want some disk failure protection really since these are mostly the drives I pull out from my main server as I upgrade to larger drives
If the total data is 3tb and you want disk failure protection I would take your two 6tb disks and put them in a mirror. With the amount of data you have and the drive sizes at your disposal that makes the most sense. This leaves you with 3tb free for growth. If you wanted an additional backup I would recommend storing it in a different location entirely or pay a cloud provider like Backblaze.
I would do this with ZFS but you can also do this via LVM or just straight md-raid/mdadm. I’m not sure what your issues are with zfs on popos but they should be resolvable as Ubuntu supports zfs fine to my knowledge.
An alternative you could consider is using mergersfs to logically pool indivial filesystems on each of the disks and then use SnapRAID to provider some level of protection. You’ll have to look into that further if interests you as I don’t have to much info in my head related to that solution. Its not as safe as a mirror but its better than nothing.
As others have said, discrete math is one of the obvious missing pieces. My uni also has C as the first language students learn as a part of their degree, and follows up with Java and Haskell to teach students about OOP and FP as paradigms. It’s useful to have something like C so students can learn about memory management. I’m also not seeing anything on Networking and Cyber Security (aside from Cryptography), which my university also taught.
I currently use Ubuntu for all my machines (desktops, laptops, and servers), but I used to use Void Linux on my machines for about 6 years, including on a couple of VPSes. Since you are familiar with Void Linux, you could stick with that and just use Docker/Podman for the individual services such as Matrix, Mastodon, etc.
In regards to Debian, while the packages are somewhat frozen, they do get security updates and backports by the Debian security team:
linux
Oldest
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.