Oh, to be clear, I don’t think carport solar arrays are fossil fuel propaganda. They’re a useful application where they fit. It’s the idea that solar on fields is harmful that I object to, and I worry that carport solar is being presented without the full context as a red herring, so folks like us who want more solar start objecting to utility-scale ground mount.

Nuclear is good for baseload, and although it is very clean, it isn’t quite carbon-free either. It’s also very expensive, unpopular, and has a lot of regulations. I agree it’s good and necessary, but solar and batteries are way cheaper and can go almost anywhere, so they’re way easier to deploy. With the pace of climate action we need, I don’t think it’s an either-or, we gotta do both, fast.

I don’t think it is intentional on OP’s part, but this is really well-disguised fossil fuel propaganda. Carport solar is way more expensive than ground-mounted, and it isn’t viable for utility-scale projects. Should we do carport solar? Absolutely! But we also really need utility scale solar.

And if you put it on marginal farm land and make the ground cover pollinator-friendly, it actually improves yields on nearby farms without any real loss, since that land wasn’t great for growing food anyway. (Not to mention that cropland is about the furthest thing from a natural ecosystem)

Not particularly, at least not by anyone other than my wife. She thinks I’m pretty great, and I just don’t see it. I think I’m pretty average and unremarkable, and the world will just keep moving along without me once I’m gone. Takes the pressure off a bit, tbh, because it makes the stakes pretty low. If no one values what you provide, then it doesn’t really matter if you meet their expectations or not.

Well, one of the nice things about Linux is that it’s easy to run on older hardware. So I’d recommend first getting an old computer, if you don’t have laying around one already, to be your server.

I’d also recommend checking out Yunohost. It’s a specialized distro based on Debian that makes it very easy to launch and host your own web services. Its app catalog should give you a pretty good idea of the stuff you can do!

What do you want to try to do? And what sort of hardware do you have? There are endless possibilities! But that will help narrow down.