At first I was going to say, the 3 2 1 Backup rule won’t stop the planet from being destroyed by a meteor. But then I remembered the data on Voyager1.

Pros:

• I never have to worry that my OS is working for someone else by design.
• Never surprised by ads.
• Never surprised by updates that move/remove something in the UI.
• Never have to be worried about some new feature that windows is forcing everyone to use that accesses all my data and might go rogue and delete it all or upload it somewhere.
• BTRFS feels decades ahead of NTFS
• package manager makes it easy to try new programs
• I can try multiple desktop environments
• I can write scripts to customize my experience

Cons:

• Occasionally there is a program that only officially supports windows and I have to figure out how to get it working in proton or a VM. This happens much less now than 10y ago.
• A game might say it works on Linux, but I hit some issue that my friends on windows aren’t hitting, and have to determine if I’m just unlucky or if it’s something to do with proton/Linux.
• there are still some remaining kinks being ironed out with the x11 to Wayland migration.
• sometimes there’s a bug in a package and I have to downgrade it. But that’s not really even an option in windows.

All in all, there is nothing from windows I would say I “miss”. And it feels refreshing to know I’m out of the line of fire of msft.

Curious what went wrong with your Reolink run. That’s what I’ve got. Doesn’t require an app or account, and works with home assistant.

It’s not a matter of privacy vs UX. I actually think Plex has ruined their UX. But if you have friends and family, some are tech-illiterate, some have their own media servers, and you all want to share with each other quickly and easily, Plex is the only viable option. Same if it’s just you, but you travel a lot, and want to watch something from your home server without lugging around a device that has access to your VPN and a screen/hdmi-out.

Jellyfin is really only viable if it’s just you on your own network.

To add on to the top post: with Plex you only need 1 account and can exchange access to multiple servers. I can browse all the media my account has access to with ease.

Jellyfin needs an account per server. If the client multiplexed between them seamlessly, that would probably be fine enough. But it would be nice if they supported some method of federation.

And Jellyfin has a list of CVEs that they haven’t addressed in years, which makes not want to make it visible outside my network.

I want to ditch Plex, but this is the primary sticking point for me. No criticism to the Jellyfin devs btw, they’re doing the lord’s work, I have nothing but respect for them.

Another minor one is that the Plex app works with a controller on my bazzite HTPC, but the Jellyfin one was hit or miss. I could get it to work once, and then the next day the controller would do nothing and the UI would be acting weird. I will go back and try it periodically to see if it’s ready, but last time I checked it wasn’t.

As a lifetime owner, the number of features they’ve deprecated is probably the worst part.

• Photo support (luckily Immich came along)
• Tidal integration (no idea if that was Plex or Tidal’s decision)
• Plugins (god forbid anyone add the functionality they keep removing)

It’s close between that and the last app overhaul that removed a bunch of functionality.

This was an unknown unknown for OP. Again, it’s completely fair for a new user to see the alias feature, think “ah, that’s built for aliasing one thing to another, let me try it for this directory name”, and be confused when it doesn’t work. OP can’t know what they don’t know.

And the open source community is just that, a community. Asking questions in forums is the accepted practice. And “basic” is hard to define. What is basic for you isn’t basic for someone else, in the same way that what is basic for someone else isn’t basic to you.

Highly recommend remapping common characters to easy-to-access hand movements. The keyboard is a tool to make things easier. I never use caps-lock, but I use esc all the time, so I regularly swap them (or just have a second esc bind).

It is worth acknowledging that this probably seems unintuitive to a new user. Makes it look like the shell has two different aliasing systems.

It makes sense the more familiar you are with bash, though. If you ever tried to cd /some/other/path-with-docs/in/the/string you’d end up accidentally running cd /some/other/path-with-/media/docs/in/the/string.

Which would be confusing at best, or a security issue at worst. Better to see that $ in the cmd and know you’re injecting a var’s value.

I knew the article was going to mention NTSYNC, but is that really it?

I get that we don’t want the argument for compatibility to effectively allow windows to define what the linux kernel has to looks like, but afaik this is one instance. The headline makes it sound like a systemic issue.

Could you maybe elaborate on the feature parity?

1. I travel often. There are a lot of devices in hotels, bnbs, and friend’s houses that have native plex support. Not so much for jellyfin.
2. Casting to cast-compatible devices is very hit-or-miss, but mostly miss. I know the casting ecosystem is already a mess, but as far as user experience goes, Plex has spent more effort ironing it out.
3. The native Plex client works with a controller on my bazzite HTPC when launched from the steam ui, while the native jellyfin client doesn’t.

I keep trying jellyfin out every few months, but so far keep hitting enough friction that I can’t reliably make the switch.

as in separate jellyfin account per each different jellyfin server?

Yes, if me and 5 of my friends have jellyfin servers, we all need accounts on each other’s servers. I then need to juggle accounts to access their content.

Jellyswarrm is a reverse proxy plugin I could run to mask the problem for myself, but it’s not a solution for mom who may have access to my server, and one other friend’s server that I don’t know.

The correct solution is federated accounts, but the devs have already stated that they don’t want to do that.

Why would you host it openly rather than in a VPN like Tailscale or whatever wire guard is?

Then friends and family have to be on my VPN to stream anything.

To me this means they know they don’t have a viable business model. It’s possible they took on a lot of debt years ago, and now they have to enshittify to pay it back. I paid for the lifetime membership years ago, and I would say I’ve more than gotten my money’s worth and I’m mostly still happy with Plex, but I would drop them in a heartbeat if jellyfin was a viable alternative.

People don’t like to admit it, but jellyfin doesn’t have feature parity yet. I think they could solve a lot of the issues if they went the federation route, but until then, it’s just easier for my family and friends to each have 1 plex account instead of N jellyfin accounts. Not to mention the jellyfin vulnerabilities that prevent me from considering hosting it openly.

I have a TrueNas system locally with periodic cloud sync jobs to backblaze B2.

I was trying to do this recently and learned that, I guess certain bluray drives have been identified as compromised by the powers that be. As a result newer bluray disks ship with a list of those drives, and when your drive’s firmware sees that it is on the list, it will refuse to open the disk. I have an old bd drive from ~2008 that was ~60% effective at ripping my library.

I also tried my best to use fully open source tools in combination with an up-to-date KEYDB.CFG, but never had as much success as just using makemkv.

The most extreme route I found is to refer to makemkv’s list of drives that can have their firmware flashed to prevent it from refusing to read a disk. I haven’t gone that route, but would definitely consider it if I was looking for a drive.

Either way, just remember to support artists when you can. Bandcamp Friday is one of the best ways I know of to fund artists in exchange for FLACs that you can legally listen to however you want to.

But I was a broke student in the heydays of torrenting, so I’m not judging using any means necessary to listen to music.

Lol I don’t know what you want man, i didn’t realize this was one of those “digging my heels in because I don’t know how to be wrong” threads. I’ll let you do your thing, peace.

Who is “we”? I’m responding to your top level comment. You just asked the creator of an exclusively client-side app whether they support encryption. Not only is it reasonable for me to assume you mean client side encryption, it’s unreasonable for you to ask for server side encryption, because there is no server. It’s a BYOBackend situation.

Now if you’re asking for client-side encryption, something like Keepass where the file itself is encrypted, you have to use some form of auth to decrypt it on use, and you can store this file using whatever backend you want, that’s perfectly reasonable. I would still consider that encrypted at rest, but at least you could maybe separate encrypted reads from writes and limit the attack surface in the event of a breach.

All phones are already disk encrypted these days. If you want disk encryption on your PC, you should enable it. Otherwise, it’s the responsibility of whatever backend you choose to handle encryption over the network.

You might be surprised how little power it’s sipping when sitting idle. Unnecessary disk accesses might be the biggest power use in those hours, but that’s more likely to cost you due to wear and tear and eventual replacement of the drive.

I recommend buying a Kill-a-watt and monitoring your power consumption on the server for a week or two. Then do some math to see how much it’s actually costing your energy bill. If it’s actually considerable, then try using tools like powertop to see if you can determine what’s generating all the activity.

Ok, I misread what you were linking to. Yeah, that’s pretty bad to allow actual streaming of content to unauthed users. I agree they should not be encouraging anyone to set this up to be publicly accessible until those are fixed. Or at least add a warning.