I bought my first camera a few years ago, so I can give you the advice others have told me. The lens is more important than the camera, and it’s good to get into a decent lens ecosystem. I personally use a ZVE-10 (even though I mainly do photo, as it was significantly cheaper than the A6400 in my region. Lack of EVF sucks though, so I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone that only wants to do photo)

If you want to go for the Sony ecosystem, the a6400 is a good pick. Lots of people also like the a6300 (older version of a6400), a6100 (older entry-level camera), and the a6000 (another older camera).

For E-mount lenses, good general-pirpose zooms would be the Sigma 18-50mm f2.8 and the Tamron 17-70mm f2.8. The Sigma primes are very sharp, but lots of people also like the more affordable TTArtisans and Viltrox lenses that are almost, if not equally, as sharp.

If you prefer the Canon ecosystem, you could either go with a DLSR (bigger and heavier, but usually cheaper) or mirrorless (lighter, but a bit more expensive). I don’t know much about it though, so I can’t tell you anything more than that.

There’s also Nikon, Fujifilm, and the L-mount alliance, but I don’t know much about any of them all too much.

I remember someone told me that Sony has great AF, Canon and Nikon both have good colours, Fujifilm has film simulations + more retro control dials/design, and L-mount is a shared mount between Panasonic, Olympus/OM System, and Leica (so you can mix and match lenses and cameras between those three) and also give you M43 (sensor is smaller than APS-C, but more compact lenses). If you go with any of those ecosystems you’ll be fine, they all make good cameras.

if it’s not a bird nor a plane, it must be superman!

just installed it, and it works great :D

I’ve got LibreTranslate installed so don’t need another translator, but Mozhi seems pretty cool though :D

update: I’ve installed forgejo! Super easy once I figured out I had to create a new user. I’ve set up a second origin for my repos called “local”, since it will be a nice local backup for all my code.

How do I set up backups for Immich, Nextcloud, and Radicale? I see lots of different options, I can’t pick!

Should I get Gitea or Forgejo? Forgejo seems to be a more free/libre fork of Gitea, the latter of which is influenced by a for-profit company. Is Forgejo functionally equivalent to Gitea, and if not, what are the differences? If they are basically the same I would probably go with Forgejo over Gitea. Is Forgejo’s documentation and setup similar, better, or worse than Gitea?

that makes sense, not having all your eggs in one basket.

hence keepass :D

might set up syncthing too so I can sync my passwords p2p…

I personally prefer keepass and really don’t trust my server to be secure enough with all my passwords…

That’s a big list. I already use joplin, but never knew you could self-host syncing! I’ll do that then :D

Ah, that seems pretty cool :D

It’s just an old laptop I had lying around. 8GB of ram, 256GB of storage, some old intel i5 processor (10th or 11th gen I think?). No performance hiccups, everything works well :D

I have another older laptop with a dead battery, 6th gen i3, 4GB of ram, and 128GB of storage that I haven’t touched yet, but might do so in the future.

yep, will do that. That seems really important

Radicale’s official documentation didn’t help me much, so I followed some youtube video (by “Awesome Open Source”) where you use a docker image instead of a python venv + pip install.

For Immich, official docs were fantastic!

For Nextcloud, I followed Learn Linux TV’s “How to Set Up Nextcloud on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS” (though I used Debian, not Ubuntu)

Ooh, I didn’t know you could self-host joplin sync! I’ve been using backblaze for quite a long time for that.

I am, indeed, a developer. I might try locally hosting Gitea/Forgejo as an extra backup. I assume you can have multiple “origins” in git, right? That means I can back my repository to both codeberg and server.

Grist seems pretty cool too.

I hosted radicale first so already had my events sorted out. Wasn’t really bothered moving them again. Also, I like radicale, it’s simple and it works.

that seems quite important, I’ll do that then!

ooh I might try that then!