Thinking about implementation, it seems like tooltips would be a great way to handle this. Linking out from the tool tips to some kind of more comprehensive outside IT/cybersecurity resource would be a good bonus. Tool tip text generated by llm could take some of the heavy lifting.

As a non-coder interested in self hosting and somewhat aware of cybersecurity, this is the most relevant take for me.

An application that facilitates safe self-hosting of many different service is great, however for it to be actually safe and useful it must either be a cybersecurity service keeping up with the pace of threats (which is essentially the corporate closed source model) or from the ground up be an educational platform as much as an application. Documentation needs to not only be comprehensive, but also self-explanitory to a non-technical audience. It is not enough to state that a setting or feature exists, it must also be made clear why it should be used and what the consequences of different configurations are.

This approach is almost never done effectively by FOSS projects unfortunately. Fortunately I think we are at the point where it is completely feasible for this type of educational approach to be fully replicable and adaptable from a creative commons source to the specific content structure of the application user manual using LLMs (local ones). The big question is, what is the trusted commons source of this information? I suppose there are MIT and other top university courses published for open use online that could serve as the source material, but it seems like there is likely a better formatted “IT User Guide Wiki” and “Cybersecurity Risk and Exploit Alert List” with frequent updates out there that I’m not aware of, perhaps the annals of various cybersecurity and IT associations?

Anyway I’m aware this is basically calling for another big FOSS project to build a modular documentation generator, but man would it help a lot of these projects be viable for a wider audience and build a more literate public.

awesome! glad to see it.

Well there are 15 days left on the kickstarter but it has been up for a while. I didn’t catch the medical office thing before, but makes perfect sense, they are clearly a commercial/enterprise targetted business and this is their first kickstarter. They just don’t know how to market to the masses.

I agree the software documentation is lacking, they claim it is easy to setup but they don’t show what it is actually like.

I get a sense that this could be a diamond in the rough but to your point about drivers I agree support is going to make or break this device. I think there are some indications that could be decent, the company itself appears to be software-first and targeting highly regulated industries (medical and transport) that require zero downtime. So long as the company itself survives I would guess drivers will likely stay updated. As long as the company survives.

To that point, it seems like this kickstarter is a line in the water for rebranding their enterprise “private cloud” hardware for general use, but they half baked the launch.

IDK, I’m tempted, but without better documentation it’s hard to spend that cash.

What do you think? It isn’t cheap but seems like great hardware to a n00b like myself, I like the future-proofness and repairability of the slots it has. Possibly worth it?

Thanks, try now

I love this idea, but I agree lack of docker auto-installation as a part of your executable is going to make it harder to convince less techy folks to use, and they (we) strongly prefer a one click installation process at the front end.

Overall though, I love this concept and will give it a shot!