they are a great example of over engineering just to over engineer. lots of neat ideas that dont serve a purpose in the end. the only personal complaint i have is i dont like the trackpad. they tried to look like an apple trackpad but the button resistance wasnt considered. so its uncomforable to me with extended use. ive also had to replace two dead trackpads.

battery life is average. screen is flimsy but looks nice. lots of things are ok, not bad, just ok. without the hype of being repairable its just another macbook air clone you’d only buy after it goes on sale. if they’d allowed the design to be a little bulkier and used stronger parts instead of gimmicks, it could have been something worth its price.

i do like the aspect ratio and keyboard. the magnetic bezel is a great fidget. getting it without ram and ssd was nice. didnt have to toss the preinstalled ones when i put in 32gb and a 4tb ssd. but its not a ‘great’ laptop its just a laptop.

their lack of response to all this was emphasised by leaving all the racist and terfy comments up on the community forums for days. it was like browsing twitter.

they’re fine. im not throwing out my first get 13" but im also not upgrading it. i’ll use it till it dies and replace it like any other laptop*. it turned out to be a perfectly fine device. i knew going in i was spending extra for the chance it’d be my “last laptop” that’d be periodically upgraded. it’s definitely fallen short in daily use. decent enough computer that i dont regret having tried it. but i’d stopped suggesting framework to people long before we found out they’re a bunch of assholes.

meshcore is licensed the way you do it if you plan to go freemium down the road. its fine to use if your area has already gone that way. but meshtastic fits better in a foss standard and does the same thing.

either way you go its best to see these as fancy pagers not diy instant messagers. they have some great potential in a world where govs or nature can knock down cell service, if you’re purposeful and realistic about it. but they are not as easy to build as youtube would tell you. and they’re not gonna replace your phone full time.

i’d say start small. do the the webpage on some old hardware, maybe a wiki. content consumption things that would be uncomplicated for the group to adopt. avoid things that would mean managing accounts for other people early on. a wiki or some static page using something like modocs will be easy to run off a decent internet connection at the building. low bandwith usage and low traffic.

if your goal is to degoogle group, nextcloud could be helpful for the organisers. maybe if you have success on the simple sites you can get people on board with some hardware for a small nextcloud server. but dont plan on opening the next cloud up to the kids. thats a world of risk you don’t need to open up.

if you’ve already got something at home to run it on and want it easy to set up/maintain. take a look at mkdocs.

so did the author spent a bunch of money while excited about sticking it to companies upon discovering a company is not your friend. didn’t enjoy the work of maintaining the services or have any friends to share them with. then dreamed up federated services so someone would do all that continuing maintenance for them? am i the weird one here for only putting effort into services i have other users for or actually enjoy doing?

if you want easy java minecraft i might try something like https://github.com/itzg/docker-minecraft-server though i’ve not tested that one beyond ‘it did install’.

for bedrock this walkthough does a good job of covering the steps. https://harrk.dev/dedicated-bedrock-minecraft-server-ubuntu-setup/

microsoft has a habit of changing the download url regularly so automating it gets annoying. my kid has moved onto java so i’ve just left the bedrock server shutdown.

if you really want to run a java server outside docker and you’re comfortable with bash scripts, i can post mine here. but one of the docker builds is going to be the simplest way to get started with it.

symfonium has been mentioned in this post before specifically for android auto. i had the same hang up with apple car play. i didn’t use most of the plexamp fancy features. i just wanted it to play music and be easy to use when driving. manet finally came along for ios. though i’m still hoping one of the open source apps adds the functionality later.

the ldap auth works great for the apps. apps dont play well with an oidc login process. i ended up using both, oidc for web and ldap fall back for applications. made it easier for my non tech inclined users. most of the current apps also support quick connect, like the plex link process. you auth on a web browser and enter a code into the app. so it’s possible to use only oidc for log in and, i believe it should be possible use css to even hide the user name and password fields.

honestly every explanation probably just ends at ‘this is what i learned on and it works’. same way i religiously use nano and try to do everything in bash first. or how a couple coworkers can’t stop explaining their vim workflow and defending python unprompted like it’s a trauma response for them. my current homelab is also running a r9 with 64gb ram and 30tb storage. if i were paying for remote hosting, still using salvaged hardware or being paid, i’d invest time learning newer processes. but containers haven’t caught my interested and this set up takes basically no effort on my part to maintain, so i can focus my limited free time elsewhere.

there’s been a LOT of progress on jellyfin, especially the past year or so. i’ve been using plex since it forked from xbmc, it ran on the bottom half of a laptop connected to a mostly working projector, both rescued from a dumpster. it’s been a fantastic platform for a long time. but i’ve also wanted off plex since they rolled out the plex account req. jellyfin is finally there for me at least.

https://github.com/jellyfin/Swiftfin i’ve got 5 apple tv users, two android tv and one webostv

if you use the oidc connection and apps that support quick connect you can do it. you basically end up doing things like the plex link process that got implemented when they forced everyone into their authentication service. i almost went that route but opted to leave the password auth from ldap in. its the kind of log in process most people are used too and i’ve got a few elderly users. i disabled password reset in authentik though and everyone gets a 3 word 24 char minimum password.

https://github.com/jellyfin/Swiftfin is available for tvOS. works great for me with one bug. since i have homepods connected to one of my apple tv’s as it’s speakers. i had to change the setting to use the native video player instead of vlc to avoid and audio delay bug. that cost me the auto play next episode function. i though not auto playing the next episode would annoy me, but it’s turned out to not be a issue at all. but infuse doesn’t include that bug if you want both homepod tv speakers and auto play next episode with jellyfin. as for security, since jellyfin is more modifiable it has a lot more room for misconfiguration for sure. plex had plenty of it’s own security issues, we just only heard about them when some security blogger discovered it.

https://github.com/jellyfin/Swiftfin

i ended up doing both. ldap for the apps. oidc for web based users and the apps that support the quick connect feature. the local user account system works fine too, and ldap would be enough. i just wanted an excuse to play round with sso systems, and it was fun figuring out how to connect all my servers.

authenik has a good docs site for both it’s docker container and connecting it to jellyfin. Authelia looked interesting too.

it’s just what i’m comfortable with. started playing with linux servers before docker existed. i’ve got frigate and authentik running in docker, but if i have the option to run something outside docker i still prefer that.

https://github.com/intro-skipper/intro-skipper
*edit it’s such a common complain this got posted twice at the same time :)

plex is still definitely easier to get started on. i don’t begrudge anyone still going that route, i had a lifetime plexpass the last 8yrs i think. jellyfin is a great option if you either already know how to set things up and want full control. Or you’re looking for an opportunity to learn more about reverse proxy, dns and authentication/access systems. plex is still i nice gateway drug.