No worries. You have several places where you can store icons, themes, etc. The Book has some good information on this. You might not be running ArchLinux, but these paths will apply to you as well. You can basically overlap system-wide icons with user-specific icons in your home directory.

To easily get the icons from the system directory into your home directory you can just copy them and make the alterations in your home directory.

Also, like the others here also said: great work on getting so far in such a short amount of time!

The sudo makes this a bit suspicious to me. Maybe you can store the results in ~/.local/share/icons/hicolor (not sure if that’s exactly the correct path. It would allow you to run this for a specific user instead of doing things with your entire system.

What’s the use case? Is there a reason that the disk is not unlocked at boot/login?

I think any distro will do really. I’d go for something that is friendly to new users, if you’re not very familiar with Linux in general. For example: Linux Mint. Here is an example on how you can get your installation setup easily: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyT4wfz5ZMg

Regarding your Valve Index. It will likely work, but don’t expect it to be very easy to get it running well. I’m currently on Arch Linux with red team hardware and a Valve Index. For example, you will need to ensure the udev rules are set properly: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-devices. New issues occasionally arise, see: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/SteamVR-for-Linux/issues. Currently, it’s not switching audio devices automatically, so I use pavucontrol (with PipeWire) to switch that manually.

Oh I didn’t know that yet! Amazing stuff.

You’re in luck. As far as i recall wincompose is inspired by Xorg’s Compose feature (https://github.com/samhocevar/wincompose?tab=readme-ov-file#features). Depending on your installation you can toggle it via some settings, or by running: setxkbmap -option compose:ralt

I always find the book useful for this stuff: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Xorg/Keyboard_configuration#Configuring_compose_key

That should be easily solved with: sudo apt install curl

I think that should be possible. You’ll likely need to get Jellyfin running with that cloudflare tunnel. There are probably alternatives to cloudflare tunnel as well, but I’m not very familiar with it. I believe there are some limitations with the tunnel, so you will have to check that out. Otherwise there should be no issue.

Dozens of GB sounds like there’s a lot of media files to me. I’d not share that via Syncthing. Assuming that is correct: Wouldn’t a media server like Jellyfin be a better fit? Or if it’s photos, I recommend Immich. Note that Immich is under active development and should not be your only place to store photos.

I think self-hosted cloud is a vague statement, but I think with your network infrastructure you will be limited in what you can do. I think cloudflare tunnel could be a good option for getting the device available online.

Then the self-hosted part. There are so many things you can look into. You can run everything in Docker, install the software you want directly on your laptop, and much more.

You’ll likely also need a reverse proxy. Can use nginx proxy manager, traefik, or something similar for that.

What are your goals with the self-hosted cloud? That would help you in making it easy to find resources and others here to give you advice.

Edit: typo’s

Well… I guess I have been living under a rock. Today is the first time to have heard of info. I have been using man for well over 2 decades now.