Thank you for this post!

For me, getting into self hosting was nice because of the privacy and tinkering yes, but a huge part of it was just having my stuff work reliably and without enshittification.

I just set up my Home Assistant server and new Zigbee network in the past few weeks and it’s pretty awesome. Was already using Jellyfin despite having a lifetime Plex pass. Feels good man.

I think installing Linux exposes you to higher severity issues, like “now it won’t boot”. Once you get over that initial setup, it’s not much different than windows or apple.

I think that’s also the case any time you are the OS installer and administrator for your own system. I haven’t purchased an off the shelf PC for myself since the '90s, and in the years since then I’ve had many more basic “this shit won’t boot” issues with Windows, though granted I used Windows much more during that time.

And even if you ARE setting up your pen system from scratch, I would submit that the install process for Linux Mint is an order of magnitude simpler than Windows these days.

Being simple to use out of the box is NOT a bad thing on its own. We are simply used to seeing the proprietary profit-driven version, which is the path to enshittification. When something works great out of the box but you still own your machine and have access to any damn thing you want that’s hidden from view by default, that is just a good product.

I’ve been an engineer in electronics and software for over 20 years. I have a masters in software engineering. I currently work on C and C++ code every day for embedded systems, including one that’s embedded linux. The terminal is my comfort zone. Screens full of super-legible monospaced text please my eyes.

I run Linux Mint Cinnamon (btw) on every computer of mine, even my work machine, and I don’t care who knows it!

I recommend it to anybody of any skill level who will listen.

Just yesterday I wiped the drive and installed Linux on the 3rd old PC for the LAN setup I’m putting together, literally “for the children!”

It’s an i7-920 from 2008. It has TRIPLE channel ram, baby. I installed Linux Mint Cinnamon and it was as quick and painless as usual.

I already get the warm fuzzies when I walk into the room and find my 3rd grader playing on my PC instead of their tablet or even the console. Our first LAN party is gonna be sweet.

I was actually going to comment that I now know about this cheap option thanks to the lawsuit, lol.

I don’t watch live TV because I value my time, but every once in a while there’s a reason to tune into that one thing.

FOSS is free and open source software. And the word “free” does a lot of heavy lifting there because it refers to much more than it typically not costing anything. It means that you have the freedom to do what you want with your stuff, basically. You (or others on your behalf) can see the source code for what the software is doing, and you can even change and improve it.

You’ll see the word “libre” thrown around in this context too, for that reason. For many people the liberty side of free matters a lot more than the no-cost side. But they do go hand in hand, because not needing to protect a revenue stream makes it a lot easier to not enshittify software. You’ll see names like LibreOffice and FLOSS instead of FOSS.

So it’s basically the whole Linux world that is very well represented on Lemmy and the fediverse. :)

Sent using FOSS Voyager web client …in FOSS browser LibreWolf (a fork of FireFox) …on FOSS operating system Linux.

I use Mint btw.
(This is an inside joke for the other Linux people – a play off of “I use Arch btw” where Arch Linux is a hardcore distro where you kind of build your operating system piece by piece, but with excellent documentation. Valve switched SteamOS to be based on Arch a while back)

Longtime lifetime Plex Pass holder here.

FOSS is important. Having control over how you use your own hardware and files is important.

But even if none of that mattered, once I actually used Jellyfin for a few days the snappy bloat-free feel of it won me over. Switching between Plex and Jellyfin felt like switching between windows and linux.

I hope you have fun as well, whether your account is deleted or not!

One note about the complaints and drama in response to your suggestions though: I see your instance is lemmy.ml and that fact alone will make a lot of people respond to you with hostility, regardless of what your personal political beliefs actually are.

And I don’t know the latest of who is defederated with who, but you may also not even see some of the more decent communities.

Im tired of smartphones consuming everyone’s minds.

Resisting the standard smartphone addiction just makes the addiction of some others so much more apparent. My own wife is still pretty badly shackled to hers.

I love hearing the individual specifics. All the variety and niches that make life interesting.

It’s funny you mention getting back into Japanese, because my big focus this year has been rebuilding and upgrading my koi pond. It would be neat to learn the language, but knowing how I function I don’t think it’s in the cards for me.

Then for my more physical activities, that was carpentry and construction driven by the damn pond. :D

It’s perfect for me though. I am a builder and creator to my core, and my career is in software and electronics, so outdoor wood working perfectly offsets that.

Oh same here! My reduced phone usage has been part of a much larger overall improvement in my well being and being able to live in the moment and be content.

I recently saw a video from a harvard dude talking about how we NEED to be bored. It’s when we fall into our baseline mental state and start thinking through shit and figuring life out. And not doing that can lead to anxiety and depression and other bad shit. Given my experiences, I certainly cannot disagree.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=orQKfIXMiA8

Smart phones are simultaneously such a wonder of human engineering and have become such a disappointment of human greed.

This whole situation has made me just care less about my phone, and use it less in my life while I use Linux PCs much more.

I don’t see my phone as a “computer” at this point, really. It’s more of a communication appliance. If I’m launching an app that’s not texting, calling, GPS, or music, it’s probably a replacement for a website I’d normally use on a PC.

Linux phones could change this though. The idea of your PC being your docked phone would work great for most use cases. Unfortunately though, even though I would love it I don’t really see the general public jumping at the chance to get back to the desktop experience. I could maybe see a little traction in the business world.

Yeah it’s more about the idea of Youtube rather than something it actually used to be. Google has owned it so long that there’s no real difference.

My first reaction to your reply was that post-scarcity utopia is a bit broader in scope than having a decent streaming platform with existing technology.

But nah, you’re right. It’s the same greedy bullshit preventing something resembling a post-scarcity world that prevents tech products from staying good.

Unless they are free, of course. In both ways!

My first reaction to your reply was that post-scarcity utopia is a bit broader in scope than having a decent streaming platform with existing technology.

But nah, you’re right. It’s the same greedy bullshit preventing something resembling a post-scarcity world that prevents tech products from staying good.

Unless they are free, of course. In both ways!

I think the YouTube model is more of the high tech future of entertainment that was promised to us. It’s one subscription to a massive service that has entire channels dedicated to whatever niche subject you are after.

Unfortunately, that great idea of a project got purchased by Google a very long time ago, and it is well into the user-hostile enshittification phase.

You know, now that you said that, thanks to the “if you aren’t growing you’re dying” business culture our business owners and executives have become more like farmers of businesses rather than stakeholders and caretakers.

Enshittification is the harvest!

The goal is not to create a good business. The goal is to force feed and fatten it up until it is right at the point where its legs will break under its own weight the next time it stands up. Then you start to harvest, consume, or sell every bit of the grotesque thing you can before you either sell it cheap to some sucker up in the mountains or watch it die at your feet.

But to be fair, I do know actual small-time livestock farmers. Cows and horses. They care way WAY way more about their animals than sociopathic MBAs care about their organizations, employees, customers, human families, and so on.

unlicensed streaming is the predominant source of TV and film piracy, accounting for 96%

96% from streaming? Wow, really? That’s almost nothing being contributed by boring old-fashioned downloaded media from things like bittorrent and that other one that’s totally not worth talking about.

You guys might as well just ignore those ancient, decrepit download services. What a total waste of your valuable resources! There are so many people out there with jailbroken Fire Sticks! It would be such a waste of your time going on a wild goose chase after imaginary evil communist nerds who buy mechanical hard drives and download “free” software that’s been pre-approved by their communal repository authorities.

Remote viewing in Jellyfin requires significantly more work from me as the server admin, but it is just as easy for the remote viewing clients. I don’t have to do any first-time setup for them. I recommend an app or two for the media type they’re using, and all they need is URL, login, password.

On UX, Plex is more full-featured I’m sure, but the performance is so much better on Jellyfin that it quickly overrode any feature concerns I may have had.

And being FOSS, there’s some nice diversity in client apps. I use Finamp for music and really like it. There’s Plappa for audio books too. And for basic viewing there are multiple choices. I think I use Streamyfin because it supports downloads.

Strongly agreed, from the owner of a dust covered lifetime Plex Pass.

Even if we eliminate all the other reasons you might not want to use Plex or might want to use FOSS, just the performance and UI responsiveness alone makes it worth the switch.

And I do have some non-techy family that watches remotely on smart TVs and uses phone apps.