I saw a post on the Mastodony side of Fediverse saying "Some people tweak their Linux installs in the same way other people tend to their home gardens" and it gave me 2d6 of psychic damage because it was just true and was also about me.
I don't even hop distros, I just like fucking around with the configs and shit of the distro I'm already at. It's -- How I procrastinate. Rather than do work I play around with reorganizing my work setup.
Get into Home Assistant. A whole new world of tinkering and reconfiguring, with the added stress of real world "Why didn't that extremely complex automation controlling my porch lights work?"
Job site got canceled, away from home, nothing else to do. Spent the last few hours cleaning up and "perfecting" my Home Assistant. I'm sure I'll do it again in a few days.
It's never perfect!
I have a temperature sensor in box here that I haven't yet installed...hmmmmmwhere could I put it!
Actually if Shelly ever gets me the stuff I ordered IN NOVEMBER I would replace the one for the pellet stove with that...but last night I saw a Tuya Zigbee air quality monitor on Amazon for under $25 that would be even better...
Oh wait, I installed a Zigbee switch the other day but haven't added the lights it controls to my floor plan view!
if you have an esphome supported board the ikea air quality monitors are even cheaper, I just got one of those lol
Oops, Plans changed, I guess I could update my home assistant while I wait.
The following 14 plugins are no longer configured by configuration.yml......
Eh, it's just like Linux. Sometimes you just backup valuables. Scrap the whole thing and start from scratch again.
Personally, I'm loving the less YAML configs I have to do these days. Use to spends hours configuring it. I much prefer the click a button here and there and I'm done.
Getting old and lazy.
I have a pi docker setup I could run it on...... Don't tell me that 😂
Is there a list somewhere of HA friendly less proprietary...... Stuff that works well with it?
Wellllllll it depends on what you want to do. For example, I have some devices from Shelly (a company I'm currently pissed off at) that allow me to make a lot of devices smart. For example, I'm using one as a thermostat for our pellet stove, controlled by HA, with a fairly complex script setting the pellet stove temperature based on the time of day, outside temperature, and other factors. The Shelly switches come with software that's pretty good, but you can install Tasmota (I think) on them, which is open source software (I still use the original Shelly software). Those are wifi devices.
Similarly, I have some power-monitoring plugs (the washer is plugged into one to monitor power usage, to alert me when the cycle is done), and those are made by a company called Sonoff, but they're (relatively) easy to flash to Tasmota, I've gotten to the point where I can do one in a few minutes, without soldering. I have another one from Sonoff for a ceiling fan that I flashed Tasmota on, and it also works well with one limitation (in the hardware, not software): The light is only on or off, no dimming. These are also wifi devices.
Things like Zigbee and Z-wave are supported, so they do not have direct internet access, so it's not the same sort of concerns as with Wifi.
Proprietary stuff is supported as well, mainly because there's so much of it - the big name is Tuya, a Chinese company that makes a ton of cheap Wifi devices (also Zigbee, but those are less of an issue). Some of them can be flashed to install something more open like ESPHome, some cannot, it depends on the device. The default for them is cloud control, but there are various options for controlling them locally.
My light switches and most of my temperature sensors are Zigbee. As mentioned I have some Wifi devices for various things.
Things like thermostats: You're basically stuck with proprietary because there aren't many open source options. I mentioned the pellet stove, which I use the Shelly to control, paired with a Zigbee temperature and humidity sensor (Aqara brand), and it works well, but I'm not sure I'd be comfortable turning over my house's main HVAC to HA - it's more complex, and if HA goes down my house is going to get hot or cold. I use an ecobee, but other brands are supported as well.
... And Fedora Silverblue. Perfect for tinkering. I love how I can always install apps and remove them at my leisure, without leaving traces ;)
That's it, I'm setting up a LFS box and hostnaming it something garden-related, there's always a package to be updated
I already finished 10 times. And I probably will be doing 10 times again.
Except you count a windows vm with gpu-passthrough then I am still on it.
I run my emby and jellyfin server, my desktop, printer server, plus a bunch of other shit I can’t think of right now.
If any of that shit doesn’t work, I will be annoyed. So I’m certainly not tinkering with it all the time.
emby and jellyfin
you need both of these things? Dont they both do exactly the same thing?
Lol the roku client for emby was annoying me, so I installed jellyfin just so I could use the jellyfin roku client. Which turns out to also be buggy and annoying. So now I’m running both and I’m tempted to install plex next.
I'm one of the programmers of the Jellyfin Roku client. Would you mind sharing what things you found to be buggy and annoying in the client? We're always looking for feedback for things to work on and improve.
I can't say I've ever seen any showstoppers for the jellyfin Roku client, but I will say it seems rather inconsistent when using the media options menu after selecting a movie. Sometimes choosing a different video reverts to the default top choice when you hit play. Sometimes the audio selections don't match up with the chosen video but rather a different video option, meaning any choice is the wrong choice. At one point I even got the client to say that AAC Stereo was both the chosen Video and Audio. It's really hard to describe and never enough a nuisance to wade through the process of opening an issue.
I knew about the audio option not matching if you choose a different video option. In fact, we noted that in our release post: https://jellyfin.org/posts/roku-200#-tv-episode-version-support
The others I've not heard of before. If it every becomes a nuisance, please open a ticket so we can investigate.
Ah, I didn't see that because I haven't generated types for TV Shows yet. Only movies.
Thank you for the ongoing support!
My main use case is that I watch a lot of tv shows, often while I am in bed going to sleep.
So I want the episodes to be labeled correctly in sequence, like season number and episode number. I want those numbers to be displayed correctly when I navigate episodes. When I pause it’ll stop the app, I want the correct season and episode to show up in the “Continue watching” list. And I want auto play to continue playing the next episode after the current episode completes.
I have found both emby and jellyfin to have issues with the above items.
Currently I’m running both. I find myself moving back to emby more often as it seems to handle the above cases better.
Oh yeah, you're the person who asked to have the season and episode number added to the OSD. I completed that update and am waiting for the PR to be reviewed and merged.
I'm also a big TV show watcher. All the things you mentioned I've had no issue with in the Roku client.
My first question would be if your server properly identified the episodes. That process is driven by the file names. Does your naming scheme follow the suggested format? https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/media/shows/
Yes.
For some files it will not automatically play the next episode. Which sometimes also happens in emby.
I suspect this is due to some kind of issue handling file formats, or badly formatted or corrupt files. In emby I can hit the pause button and then right arrow to >| which will then play the next episode. There is some more convoluted way of doing that in jellyfin. Also in jellyfin I see in the continue watching list like s02e02 and s02e04, of the same show. Obviously I don’t want to continue watching e02 if im already on e04.
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Fine
But is your config standards-compliant and linted?
Does it degrade gracefully enough that you can load it on 1980s Unices and what is possible to load will load? Without emitting error messages??
I used to just crastinate but now I’m a pro.
Yeah, I used to reconfigure things quite a lot while I was still a student. Now with a dayjob, I'm glad if I can just use my laptop to get actual things done. Having previously figured out a really good setup, is very helpful in getting things done, though.
Time to get a VPS my friend, and figure out what needs to be hosted at home and on the VPS, and make things sync wherever required, and perfect your VPS with the right distro
Once your system setup reaches perfection (it won't), you're finally free to fine-tune VIM to your exact needs.
Already done… but now I feel like I need to switch to Neovim… and now I have to research Neovim plugins and configs….
god damn it! I was about to say that I'm done configuring after decades and can finally be productive, then I saw your comment. 🤦♂️
My system was configured perfectly one day, then I started vi and now I can’t exit. Send help.
Debian will slap you every time you decide to do some deep tinkering, so you develop healthy pavlovian reflexes.
It's the only way to have enough free time to organize my drawers in gridfinity boxes.
Yes.
I'm mostly finished ricing, everything works, but every now and then i find something I want to improve or try out.
Well there are still some things I want to implement, like adding smart window transparency to swayfx, but that is kind of a mammoth task, while I can't even get it to compile properly..,
Pretty much. After I got married and started having kids I just want a PC setup that just works when I want to do anything on it. Without needing to troubleshoot some esoteric issue because apparently my motherboard is on a different revision version that changes the WiFi card to use some shit ass MediaTek card ONLY for that revision and now I can't use WiFi or Bluetooth and I need to troubleshoot the issue for hours.
Yeah, get to a stable state and live there. No shame in using KDE/GNOME or even something as pedestrian as Ubuntu.
If you live on your computer for work, I get you tweaking stuff like every six months or so. Get that optimized workflow no matter how messy or chaotic it might look.
Every time I spend four hours figuring out how to get one tiny little thing working better in vim I find another even smaller issue that I desperately need to dig in to, and thus my actual personal projects never get worked on. I should just give up and call "tweaking my vimrc" a hobby.
Problem I have, is, after I finish tinkering and settle down with my computer for some days/months, then even anything needs fixing or changing I've forgotten how I do it!
Now you have got a good excuse to setup something to manage your knowledge base.
I recommend markdown:
- frequently_encountered_issues.md
- lots of helper scripts scripts
- Setup guides mostly taken from their respective arch wiki pages but stripped down to only show my custom setup
- a markdown file per os per machine
- etc
- Also link back to the original resources. Still copy them though. The internet is temporary.
I have a collection of org-mode files and plain text. Moved more to markdown but not for my setup notes yet. But it's still a lot of brain work to match the pieces together and remember what matters.
Now, I neat idea I heard recently: run a local llm that can index your own notes. I don't know how easy that is. There's an Emacs mode for that, right?
Sounds like a cool idea. I will add it to my selfhost list.
I still rely on openai for my llm needs but soon I will evaluate more private and self hosted solutions.
There probably is. Though I myself use nano (root permissions) and vscode.
I've finally stopped distrohopping. I'm now on nobara (used arch before that btw), and don't feel the urge, nor have the energy to distrohop, even though I want to find out what's so great about nix. That said, I still only use my computer for movies, games, and browsing, so I guess the meme still stands.
Same. I want to try NixOS, or immutable distros, or a fully containerized system, and I've been meaning to give Gentoo a shot for years as well (I'm not suffering enough on Endeavor, btw). I even got a second drive just so I don't have to throw my current setup away, but I'm just so comfy and everything just works and it'll be so much work to actually give a new system a fair shot.
Is nobara better then mint? This is someone with little Linux knowledge who is on windows 10 but refuses to use 11
Personally I prefer a rolling release or at least a bleeding edge distro, so nobara works great for me. If your laptop or computer has any latest components that are not already supported in the lts kernel, then you can try nobara, but if not, you can use mint with no issues. I would even say mint is the best starting point to Linux coming from Windows. It has all necessary things configured and ready to go, including automatic backups of the system for recovery purposes.
Oh no...
This is like me with game mods (skyrim). Spent 20 hours modding it just right... spend 10 hours in character creation and more mods for that... move on to another game.
I got past that phase a long time ago. I just use Fedora and Debian with mostly defaults
Nah, it's cyclical. We can figure one for a few years, then try out a new promising distro then we can figure that one for a few years...
I've used gentoo in my home for 23 years now. The good news is I'm down to system rebuilds once every 18 months or so.
I used to be him, missing deadlines to get my xmonad taskbar all spec'd out. Now only "hop" when my LTS is EOL, and i just run the default UI and use tmux for all my tiling since i tend to be mainly on remote systems anyway.