Right on!

Yet again, FOSS showing why it’s always the way to go vs proprietary tech. So glad I started my self-hosting journey with Jellyfin!

Cyb3rMaddy does more cyber security content, but she has a fair bit of Linux content too, same with LaurieWired.

VeronicaExplains is my favorite for pure Linux content.

Yup sorry, typo, I corrected it in my original comment. Weird it isn’t working for you, I think I have the F-droid version.

InnerTune uses YouTube music, so far it’s been really good. No sign in, no ads, decent quality, and grabs alternative versions like covers and acoustic versions too.

It allows you to download the songs, build a library, create playlists, and you can free listen to related music.

Edit: Corrected typo, it’s InnerTune.

Linux Mint OS, QBitTorrent for the client, Proton VPN for the VPN with qBitTorrent bound to only that interface and port to ensure no IP leaks.

Works Awesome.

As somebody who works in IT at a Windows-only environment, I know exactly what you mean.

I have to fight with Windows on a weekly basis. Driver issues, firmware issues, software crashes/lockups, performance issues, etc etc.

Just this week, I have two users experiencing issues with their monitors. Identical enterprise grade laptops, identical drivers, identical docking stations, all totally up to date on Windows 11. Their old Windows 10 computers worked fine. Still trying to figure out what’s wrong.

I’ve used two, NameCheap, and PorkBun.

Hated Namecheap, would never use them again. Janky pricing, tons of email spam, terrible UI.

Porkbun has been pretty great. Simple, solid prices, easy to use, no issues for about a year and a half.

And still being forced to watch ads on most of the plans.

Speak for yourself, Jellyfin has been awesome for me. Fantastic piece of software.

Yeah, ironically Arch overall has been more stable for me than Fedora lol.

Debian of course is amazing.

Good point, I only a had a few AUR packages installed, so that probably made things more stable.

If I can find a solid job somewhere else, for sure.

Jellyfin is love, Jellyfin is life.

Fighting with Linux is generally rewarding. On the rare occasion when it happens, I almost always learn a lot, and I’m able to figure out a functional solution.

Windows on the other hand feels like fighting with a manipulative, toxic partner. It happens constantly, you’re always a little on edge, and you never come out learning anything, you’re just relived that it’s over.

Timeshift has turned my system breaking updates and tinkering into a non-issue. I just set up all my systems with it right off the bat. One snapshot per day, one weekly, and one monthly.

Since doing that, I’ve never had to toss a totally borked install.

I was one of the lucky users who used Manjaro on my old laptop for over a year and never had any real problems.

I was very confused when I started getting more involved in the Linux community and kept hearing about how terrible Manjaro was.

For me, vanilla Fedora has actually been the most consistently problematic distro. I’ve had more random issues getting it set up and working properly than any other distro.

God bless Mint though, it has been basically flawless for years.

You know what’s funny about that? I can think of at 4 times in just the last year where a Microsoft outage caused significant downtime (at least 1 hour) for the company I work at.

• Twice, Outlook/Teams was having major regional issues for hours, people at my company couldn’t log into Teams and weren’t getting emails.
• Microsoft’s Dynamics platform, (which my company’s ERP software is built on) had some infrastructure issue that made it unusably slow for several hours.
• Who can forget the lovely Crowd Strike kiss of death fiasco a few months ago?

Meanwhile, the 12 year old janky Debian servers I had were running Ansible, Docker, OpenProject, and several other services without a hitch, same with all the Linux endpoints I had deployed.

Centralization causes many of these problems and makes them more severe than they otherwise would be. When you are locked into a single vendor for everything you do, you’re completely at their mercy if anything breaks.

The problem is that nobody, at least in the US, markets open source solutions. The big players corner the market, and IT just learn those big players. You should see the looks I’ve been given when I present IT directors with a quote from ix Systems for a TrueNAS solution to their storage needs. They have no idea who they are, even though they provide enterprise grade storage solutions at a fraction of the price of Dell or HP.

The US tech environment is a cyber dystopia controlled by the Tech corpos of silicon valley. It’s so frustrating.

Yeah, it really bites. And no, they don’t allow anything personal other than phones.

At least I get to use the Thinkpad, even if it is gimped with Windows. They initially weren’t even going to allow that, because their company deploys only HP laptops.

But I made a strong and slightly pathetic case to the manager and he relented. Angry that I had to kiss the ring, but right now I need the money, and I really hated their clunky HP laptops.