If your main concern is boat, you will likely be fine with any Linux distribution. There are more beginner friendly ones out there.

That said, if you play lots of PC games, even if they’re Linux compatible, switching away from Windows isn’t going to magically double your FPS. Hardware still matters.

I’ve tried just about every distro over the past decade, and I always come back to Ubuntu. It commands the largest share of the Linux market by a large margin, especially when you consider its derivative distributions like Mint and PopOS. It also has excellent support from hardware vendors, specifically NVIDIA in my case.

What file format are you outputting from HandBrake? Some like MP4 have limited support for subtitle tracks.

This is how I do it. I followed this guide to get it set up, and this one to make it work behind a VPN (Tailscale)

I share this pipe dream. Increased awareness of and access to self-hosted services encourages decentralization, reduces our reliance on massive data centers, and empowers the public to own their data. For the hobbyist, I think this is already in reach.

However, in order for such a system to succeed in the wider market, it needs to also be cheap and convenient. Even a Raspberry Pi goes for around $80 these days, and storage is becoming more expensive by the day thanks to AI companies. iCloud storage is only 99 cents a month. If, for example, ISPs were to bundle this software and storage with their modem hardware, it could happen. Hell, they could even charge a small fee to provide you with a publicly accesible domain.

Very cool. Reminds me of the Madness markdown server.

According to W3Techs, Cloudflare is used for 80.9% of all known reverse proxy endpoints which account for 19.8% of the entire Internet. It’s safe to say it’s used to host both legal and illegal content with that broad of a scope.

They are an American company and must cooperate with law enforcement when abuse is reported. If you’re planning on hosting pirated content, that most definitely violates their terms of service and will get you in trouble.

The Music app (also called Apple Music, formerly iTunes) is a library manager at its core. You don’t need an Apple Music subscription to use it. It runs on macOS and Windows.

If you’re an Apple household, Apple Music (iTunes) is still great. I don’t pay for streaming services; I buy music on iTunes/Bandcamp and rip CDs.

Apple Music has a fantastic interface for managing metadata, creating playlists, and performing complex batch jobs with AppleScript. I sync my iPhone and iPod Nano every time I add a new album, and I host my media folder on NextCloud for listening on other devices.

Thanks! What kinds of things do you intend to do with your lab? I felt that the Pi was suitable for most everything except media pipelines.

Love the evolution! How are you measuring the power consumption of your devices? I’d be interested in profiling my build as well.

Honestly, I don’t think Snaps are so bad. Canonical’s top market is enterprise, and Snaps are ideal for deploying applications in these environments. If you’re an end-user, you can literally just uninstall the runtime

My understanding is that Flatpaks are generally reserved for GUI applications and not command-line tools or servers. I’m not sure it’s the ideal format for Immich.

That said—and I’m probably going to get hate for this—there is an Immich snap package that does just what you’re looking for.

This package is essentially comprised of web apps which open in their own windows. It will not have the deep system integration that you may be used to on native MacOS. You could use this, or you could use iCloud in your browser like one might do with GSuite

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This is a well-written post. I agree that “friction” involved with small changes and incompatibility with some Linux binaries are significant downsides. I think NixOS makes a lot of sense for development environments, but it’s not my preference for a personal device

It depends on what you’re studying. Some majors like accounting might require you to use Excel, for example. On the other hand, when I was getting my BS+MS in computer engineering, running Linux was actually advantageous

Timshift is to Linux what Time Machine is to Macs. It’s a snapshot tool that lets you roll back a certain file or your entire filesystem to an earlier state

ElementaryOS does it this way