Pi works fine for trying and if you only want to stream 1 thing at a time in 720p. Just try it.

If it somewhat works but you find it slow, buy an old SFF office computer < 50 € and experiment further… Either pay close attention which integrated GPU it has or buy a cheap PCI videocard with it.

Yeah to most people that’s more effort than going through menu’s. Especially people with photographic memory benefit from GUI (don’t remember name of thing you’re looking for but you know where it can be found). Terminal for daily usage is definitely not for everyone.

There is “buy better”, it is not but a fantasy.

Buy more local / regional produced food and products, less km travelled and support local people. Buy products made from longer lasting materials if there are different versions. Buy fairtrade when it’s available for coffee, cacao, bananas, pineapple, etc. Buy bio if available. None of it is perfect, but you are still voting with your wallet and not perfect is often still better than the cheapest there is.

If you can afford it.

Buying better definitely does exist and, for non-consumable goods, definitely can result in buying less. My washing machine is from the early nineties. I expect my steamdeck to last for 2 decades at least, because it seems repairable and software won’t ever be the bottleneck. I have sweaters I wear that are over 25 years old. Endless noise just makes it hard to identify which product is the better one, you’ll often only be sure long after the purchase… And the at first sight most frugal option will often not be the better buy.

Musicbrainz Picard, there is no better user friendly solution.

Yes, it can seem like a lot of work, but you can also look at the flip side: you can learn a whole lot about the music you like in the process.

If music metadata is missing for stuff you have and like, add it to musicbrainz yourself. No, it isn’t particularly fun, but someone has to do it. I do it sometimes for more “local” albums of which I own the physical record or CD.

If shit is really messed up and you have a historic collection of mp3s from back in the days when getting a full album took a long time: don’t be scared to throw stuff out and source it again. It’ll likely be much higher quality for same or smaller filesize and have better metadata from source already, which makes using musicbrainz a lot easier. And what took many hours back then takes seconds to minutes now.

The only thing I’m looking/waiting for is a jellyfin audio player that automatically goes to full screen visualisation or lyrics after a determined amount of seconds of music playing + no user inputs… Wish I could do it myself and contribute to the project, but alas.

Those are heavy LED bulbs you got there at 12W or more. Typically LED bulb is only like 3 - 5 W??

Yeah sad they’re stopping it. I used it to easily access all services when not home… Jellyfin, audio bookshelf, dashboards, nextcloud… All worked rather well on it with very little effort (just had to turn the meshnet feature off and on again on phone once in a while). I don’t think there is any other company offering anything as simple as this was…

I don’t know about yunohost, but dietpi doesn’t feel restrictive. You can use the dietpi software manager, but you can also install whatever else you want next it using apt, docker, etc, adjust systemd, Cron, rsync etc outside of it. They just don’t guarantee they might sometimes break a thing you run outside of what they offer when you run dietpi updates?

Started playing Pikmin

+1 Dietpi on an old SFF office computer runs extremely smooth. Fiddled with Rpi too first… The few Watts lower energy use aren’t worth the hassle, old SFF’s offer so many (future) options while still getting really low idle power usage

Focus your resources to keep seeding near dead items, more local/regional/obscure things. 1 seed more or less on a 150 swarm of a very popular, new item doesn’t matter as much as being (almost) the only one left.

This machine is incredible, it easily plays the backlog of 5000+ games I haven’t played before but of which a lot are way cooler than a lot of AAA being published today because it predates many current bad game development practices. DOS, NES, SNES, Wii, GB, GBA, GAMECUBE, PSP, PS1, PS2, SEGACD, … The list goes on. Steamdeck with Emudeck is a truly amazing experience. I don’t need a steamdeck 2 anytime soon.

If you count using shady free streaming websites, I think the number is waaaay bigger than 1%

Mario Kart Wii stood the test of time really really well

I wonder if now is a good time to download all Wikipedia and put it on a spare offline drive…

HDD is cheap and enough, but SSD is silent.

+1. Very easy, very stable.

Some of it is likely still quite findable and assuming quite a few titles are many seasons of 1 show: use your known channels and redownload in more recent repacks would be the easiest, least hassle least risk of quality loss. Use Sonarr and/or jellyfin exports to identify shows with high GB per minute of runtime…

For getting nice metadata musicbrainz is the best out there imo. Sort your collection, anything new you add, run it through musicbrainz. If your music is missing from musicbrainz: add it! It is the most complete, free accessible database there is. Discogs for example is more complete but not the same level of free to access.

Beets is supposed to be good but I find it complicated, steep learning curve.

Just try it with the old laptop. I personally found dietpi the incredibly easy entry. Super bare bones Linux actually meant for raspberry pi and such, but you can run it on any old laptop. Using your all gaming rig might be a high energy usage if you’re just gonna run barely more than a NAS. If you do it with the laptop, take out the battery or put a timer on charger outlet, permanently connected and charging with a system that isn’t actively managing the battery and charging could get you a spicy pillow quickly.