Domi

In addition to these guys knowing what they are doing and pushing firmware updates straight through Home Assistant, every purchase also supports the Open Home Foundation.

I’m pretty sure you can achieve similar performance with cheaper dongles.

Yes, but that doesn’t help you with the large providers (Gmail, Outlook, …) unfortunately.

I finally moved my mail server from Hetzner to my homelab.

Pretty smooth sailing so far. For now I’m using Scaleway for outgoing mails since I can’t set a PTR record here but I might just try sending a few without PTR to see how other providers react.

Self-hosting is trivial and everyone can do it.

Exposing services to the internet is not.

Just like everyone doing open heart surgery on dummies is fine, everyone self-hosting in their own network is fine. You can buy hardware right now that connects to power and wifi and you are self-hosting.

Not sure if it counts as “budget friendly” but the best and cheapest method right now to run decently sized models is a Strix Halo machine like the Bosgame M5 or the Framework Desktop.

Not only does it have 128GB of VRAM/RAM, it sips power at 10W idle and 120W full load.

It can run models like gpt-oss-120b or glm-4.5-air (Q4/Q6) at full context length and even larger models like glm-4.6, qwen3-235b, or minimax-m2 at Q3 quantization.

Running these models is otherwise not currently possible without putting 128GB of RAM in a server mainboard or paying the Nvidia tax to get a RTX 6000 Pro.

Do you use a USB bluetooth dongle?

If yes, add a small USB extension cable between the dongle and the port, a few centimeters are enough.

If no, antennas improve reliability a lot. I swapped my internal M.2 bluetooth module to a more modern one and added magnetic antennas to the side of my case. No more disconnects since then (without xpadneo).

I also think Gnome is much prettier than KDE but KDE is a fully working desktop environment that does not need extensions to get it to a working state so here I am.

(Although I would not call KDE ugly)

The Matrix server is a normal Signal client that can encrypt/decrypt messages from your account.

Assuming you trust your server, no. I would not use it on a third party Matrix server.

Sure, I got all my Signal/Telegram chats synced to my Matrix server.

https://matrix.org/ecosystem/bridges/

That explains why my Matrix <-> Signal bridge was complaining about being disconnected.

Did you never get a replacement by the mainboard manufacturer or AMD?

EXcept all mail programs suck to an unexpected degree, but that is literally my only complaint.

What’s wrong with Thunderbird/Betterbird?

It does work via Flatpak, you have to give Freetube the “D-Bus session bus” permission and then put the following in your external player settings (this launches the flatpak mpv):

External player

mpv

Custom External Player Executable:

flatpak-spawn

Custom External Player Arguments:

–host flatpak run io.mpv.Mpv <any mpv arguments you need>

syncing to the clown, none of that

What did that clown ever do to you?

If you don’t follow their tuning guide, Nextcloud does run very poorly on SQLite and without Redis/caching. Apache also performs significantly worse than nginx + php-fpm.

https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/latest/admin_manual/installation/server_tuning.html

It does run very well with Postgres + Redis + php-fpm + OPcache and has been pretty much the center of my selfhosting endeavor since ownCloud times.

mailcow-dockerized is great, really makes email setup so much easier.

Do you ever send mails to Gmail and Office365? Do you get through the spam filter without PTR record?

Up until recently, there was no HDR support at all on regular desktop Linux. Now Wayland has HDR support and Kodi is getting it soon.

CoreELEC on Odroid (and many other ARM boxes) is able to switch between HDR/SDR, different resolutions and passthrough all audio codecs. All of which I need for proper media playback in my home theater.

Neat, I might finally be able to use a proper Linux PC as HTPC instead of an Odroid running CoreELEC once HDR switching works.

If your use case is only desktop and phone, KDE Connect can do it independently from your music service. Works in both directions as well.

I use Jellyfin but I download all my songs from Tidal, Qobuz or Deezer and tag them automatically right then and there in a clean format so Jellyfin does not have to guess at all.

I also have some automatic checks in place to convert incorrect metadata to a proper format. Like moving artists from the title (feat. Somebody else) to the artists tag Somebody; Somebody else and a bunch more.

Together with Finamp on desktop and mobile everything is pretty much working as expected.