I started with Raspberry Pi and Arduino for a scientific project that later became a published paper. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0278752

Now I have a couple Pis and ESP32s around the house doing all sorts of jobs, and am managing Docker-hosted shiny dashboards at work

It has had trouble with some subtitles. That’s the biggest issue I’ve had

It is a little convoluted how it’s set up, but I have a debt of gratitude to the Calibre community for their various add-ons freeing my legally purchased books of their DRM! Which is what enabled me to have centralized library in the first place, since they were all on different services. But now I’ve quit Amazon and have everything accessible from KOreader on my Kobo, via Calibre-web

Syncthing so you never have to mail files to yourself again.

FreshRSS for RSS reading

Readeck for saving articles for later (or wallabag, many alternatives)

HomeAssistant

Calibre-web for ebooks

PiHole

Joplin for self hosted notes

Searxng is fun for self hosted metasearch but has sadly been having trouble with Google lately

It’s handy to share media with my family! The Roku app works OK

I ate a lot of good food when I visited the UK. Honestly anyone who claims <place> has only bad food has a skill issue.

Might depend on your graphics card setup. My work laptop has pretty underpowered integrated graphics

Video effects randomly stop working sometimes, and frequently has choppy video

I posted this a year or two ago and got hit by a huge wave of furious Brave users lol. Occasionally to this day someone will stumble on it and post some tirade

I think some people won’t be able to switch just because they’ve passed the point where learning new tech is possible. But I do think for those with the will to change over, it will increasingly actually be happening rather than being muttered a threat to Microsoft, especially because the main pain points of the past (software exclusivity) is starting to break down. Some games are now running better on Linux. MS Office is increasingly being superseded by alternatives like Gsuite, Libreoffice, or just learning to code in easy languages like Python/R. And unlike in the past when Microsoft overplayed its hand and changed course to regain users with Windows 7, 10, etc, this time it seems like they aren’t going to change. They are in too deep.

You can only abuse your customers so much before they move on. I have long enjoyed using Windows, but when they announced my perfectly usable laptop wouldn’t be able to get 11 thanks to no TPM, and I had to go through a complicated set of hoops to manually install it, that was my breaking point. I will keep Windows for some limited stuff on dual boot on one machine, but elsewhere I’m going Linux only

I considered setting up a Pi for WireGuard at my mom’s house (her router doesn’t support VPN), so we could share subscriptions still, but decided it wasn’t worth the hassle and risk that they would start VPN detecting from the client: could just imagine them sending her emails about it that would confuse her lol

I use Wireguard via PiVPN and it’s pretty much foolproof. I don’t bother with Dynamic DNS but have in the past

I just moved 20k bookmarks from Pocket to Readeck, and can sympathize lol. A lot of the links are dead. I found a cleanup script I’m going to run but it’s still a huge curation challenge

Oh I think I turned off the CDN, but I’ll check, thanks for the tip

I thought that was only for tunnels

Yeah with VPN it’s more straightforward. I wanted it accessible without which was more involved. Honestly the average user doesn’t even know what tailscale or wireguard are, so you are already advanced using those

Nginx/caddy, dynamic DNS, buying a domain, setting it up with cloudflare is well outside the capabilities of most people. Took me a few hours to figure out

I think people feel loyalty to Plex and I understand why. I even understand why they’re charging for self-hosting considering their costs of delivering the dynamic DNS, software development, content info, etc. But being closed source, VC funded, and with their core product an increasingly small part of their business, it’s all a powerful recipe for enshittification. Tech Altar has talked before about how enthusiast brands often betray their users. Jellyfin was not a trivial set up for remote access, but I’ve really been happy with it, and I like having the peace of mind of having control over how it works

It can Chromecast these days