For pure energy efficiency it’s hard to beat an SBC (raspi, rockpi). Mine does a good job with Jellyfin streaming so long as I avoid transcoding.

I’ve been on Bazzite for a while now and it’s almost boring how stable it is.

I agree it’s a potential drawback for people that like tinkering. It kind of turns your computer into a very flexible gaming console.

As an experienced Linux user I’ll say immutable Fedora (Bazzite) is the most stable OS I’ve ever used. Had to do a rollback maybe once, because of bad pkg layering, which they discourage, never had a pkg conflict on upgrade, everything installs and uninstalls cleanly (with flatpak or brew), and there’s been maybe one, very uncommon, use-case I thought the OS wasn’t up to doing.

I’ve never used Mint but I’m guessing its ease-of-use is mainly due to maintenance and configuration being done largely through the UI. Immutable distros tend to be UI heavy as well because approaching problems the traditional way (through CLI) are more likely to have you edit the read only sections of the filesystem.

Immutable or not I think most casual users will be safe if they don’t use the terminal.

They fucked up by making their robots last seemingly forever, due to the fact they spy on you and get stuck every 15 mins so you never want to turn them on.

What about multiple Pis? Seriously asking. I love having a Pi as a dedicated server (small footprint, low energy, low temp). Do I really need to switch to a more traditional ITX/ATX form factor to get real reliability?

Let’s be honest, not all races are equal<br> 🫲🍊🫱

Be aware you might have to resort to nftables if firewalld doesn’t work. I use localhost a lot and the routing rules are different in that case.

Thanks for mentioning Wolf. I’m pretty happy with Sunshine but I do have those occasions where it can’t stream because my monitor is turned off (upstairs) when I’m downstairs.

As soon as I saw Plex show media that wasn’t part of my personal library I knew it was becoming enshitified.

IDK about the RPi5 but earlier models don’t do well with transcoding. You’ll want to make sure to convert all of your videos to a format widely compatible with your clients. H264 is usually compatible with any device of the last 10ish years.

Only learning curve is naming. Jellyfin seems less forgiving about filenames and folder structure than Plex was.

I convert my files to avoid transcoding but my Raspberry Pi 4B handles Jellyfin just fine.

Even if it isn’t an OpenWRT router if you have a hardwired server it can probably do a soft reset of the router or even modem (most modems I’ve used have had a web interface). If your router is in such a bad state it only responds to a hard reset it’s probably reaching EoL.

They do have the keys.

Vanilla Debian on my old netbook does alright. I think my desktop is xfce.

Only thing better I’ve used is antiX. I moved away from that one though since they insist on not using systemd and it got to be too much of a hassle to work around (lots of packages assume systemd is your init). I think Void Linux is supposed to be similar.

In theory, yes, but it wouldn’t be as significant as stopping it entirely (or pausing it instead of a hard start-stop). I only mention CPU limits because it’s extremely easy to implement.

If you use Docker/Podman to run Syncthing (a little tricky but possible) you can limit its CPU usage, which is usually the main source of power drain (besides GPU processes). If your usage is like mine Syncthing is idle 95% of the time and I wouldn’t notice if that 5% took longer than usual to do its thing.

Publishing a physical book is expensive, publishing a website is dirt cheap. For the publisher and author of a book it’s much more imperative to release good content that people will want to read, cover to cover. You can find more extensive, in-depth, and up-to-date content on the Internet but where exactly and is the info all in one place? Websites are also often made with the assumption you’ll jump around or that you know what you’re looking for. If you’re learning something new it’s often best to have a linear, paved path and not be your own guide.

Edit: Someone else said it first but I was trying to say library books are “curated” in a roundabout way.

I’ve been very pleased with ublue (Fedora) distros as daily drivers. They are very stable and low maintenance like you prefer. UCore sounds best for this purpose - https://github.com/ublue-os/ucore

Not a bad idea if you want a bare minimum solution but set up could be a bit of a pain. More info: https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/installation/openwrt_x86