Considering the kinds of questions OP was asking, which group does it sound like he falls into?

With computer stuff, you can do even better: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming

TL;DR: your documentation and your shell script (sequence of console commands you run to accomplish the task) can be the same file.

(Dunno what kind of chemistry you do, but you may have already come across this concept in the form of Jupyter notebooks or something like that.)

While I’m at it, I’d also like to mention Ansible and Git, for when you really want to keep good records and have a reproducible setup. Don’t worry about them immediately as it’s probably too overwhelming to learn all at once, but keep 'em in the back of your mind for later.

Honestly, I don’t think it’s possible to get by just trusting any particular guide without developing at least some actual understanding of the concepts underlying what you’re doing. The field is just too wide and rapidly changing for any source of info to be authoritative (and stay authoritative indefinitely after the guide is written), so it’s super important to develop the skill of looking up multiple different and possibly conflicting approaches to the task, thinking critically about them, and then synthesizing your own approach that works for your specific situation.

As far as I know, I’ve only installed Flatpaks using the terminal. The most annoying thing about them for me is having to type out the fully-qualified name of the software (e.g. org.mozilla.firefox instead of just firefox), which is a very terminal-specific issue, LOL!

War with who? I’m posting this from Kubuntu and I’d happily agree with you that Snap should fuck off and die. (In particular, the backend being controlled by Canonical makes it objectively bad compared to Flatpak.) Even among people like me who tolerate Snap (for now…), I really don’t think you’re gonna find anybody who actually likes it, let alone enough to champion it.

Can’t start a war when there’s a consensus!

Could very well be. I’m using OpenWRT and basically did the bare minimum to get it to work.

Yeah, it’s only anecdotal but I feel like hobbyists like us, who do slightly unusual things without nefarious intent, who are the ones who get hit with these sorts of issues the most. For example, I’ve noticed that some websites start throwing captchas at me or even just straight-up refuse to load with 403: unauthorized errors because I have my router set up to load-balance across two Internet connections. (At least, that’s my guess as to why it’s happening.)

That sounds less like clickbait and more an object lesson in the importance of copyleft to me.

Your question is like asking how to convert a cake into flour, sugar, milk, butter and (unbroken!) eggs.

Sell or get subpoena’d; tomayto, tomahto.

I mean non-Free Software.

When trying to explain that concept, I like showing people this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc4ROCJYbm0&t=296

The one thing I’d add is to say don’t run a shell script from the Internet unless you’re damn sure that (a) you trust the entity providing it, and (b) you’re downloading via https and haven’t typo’d the URL.

He had added a Jellyfin repo to his apt sources.list file for some reason, which is weird and likely not the right way to do it these days. But it might have been in the past, so it could be OP was following some obsolete procedure (or one AI-hallucinated from an obsolete procedure).

After realizing that OP was completely going about it the wrong way, the guy you replied to just looked up the correct way and relayed that to him.

See also: https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian

Labeling it as “SECURE” (implying the other option is insecure) is enough to make it seem underhanded to me.

In other words, it’s a dark pattern that tricks users into letting Plex MITM their connection.

Every non-Free Software will betray you eventually. It’s only a matter of time.

Be prepared for some respondents to choose the middle option as a proxy for “not applicable,” because that’s what I did.

One existing study that surveyed the general population found that about 8.4% of respondents were self-hosting users

Wow! That’s a lot higher than I would’ve expected. My guess would’ve been about 1%, or maybe even an order of magnitude or so less than that.

but the discussion is usually not made in good faith

“Everybody who disagrees with me is a troll or a shill.”

Sure, buddy, because Free Software projects run by volunteers famously have huge guerilla marketing budgets. Won’t somebody think of the poor for-profit companies who first got their leg up by taking Free Software code they didn’t write and then subsequently gradually closed and enshittified it? They’re the real victims here.