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> 🫲🍊🫱

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.

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.

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.

If it’s a mostly self-contained app, like a game or a utility, then Flatpak is just fine. If a Flatpak needs to interact with other apps on the host or, worst case, another Flatpak it gets tricky or even impossible. From what I’ve seen though, AppImage and Snap are even worse at this.

For me it really depends on the use-case. A lot of times I want persistence but don’t really care to access the data outside of the container. So rather than using the extra brainpower to make up folders myself and ensure paths don’t change I just let Docker handle those details for me. Also I use Podman a fair amount and it seems to be more troublesome when it comes to bind mounts.

I was on Ubuntu for years but the Snaps annoyed me and I was looking for alternatives so I went to Fedora (Bazzite). Couldn’t be happier. I installed Bluefin on my laptop (slightly different flavor) and that’s been nice too, although some things don’t work as seamlessly as I think it should.

Only issues I’ve had with Jellyfin are reduced flexibility in naming/organizing files and inability (for me at least) to detect personal media.

I mainly use my Bazzite machine for gaming and it was rough at first (~1 year ago) but it seems like compatibility has made leaps and bounds recently. I don’t play a ton of different games but I’ve had to do very little tweaking to make them work. 90% have been install-and-play. Usually ProtonDB can help you work out the kinks.

These are a good alternative to RPis. Just be aware some of these are sort of haphazardly assembled so they might have cooling issues or bad power supplies.

Bluefin and Bazzite have been good to me so far.

Pros and cons on the app store thing. Microsoft may curate a bit more but I think it’s inherently more dangerous. A malicious Windows app probably doesn’t have as many hurdles to get the necessary access to take over your system or otherwise cause trouble. To my knowledge, flatpaks can’t run with root permissions unless you executed as root (i.e. enter your password). Seeing that pop up should be way more of a red flag than seeing the “elevate permissions” pop up on Windows.