MudMan

For me it got particularly bad back when I was running Manjaro and the GUI package manager showed you multiple package types for the same software all the time. Three metronomes is bad, but three differently packaged versions of Steam is worse and potentially unrecoverable.

Gonna raise the notion that a good, usable piece of software would not require much, if any level of awareness on this front, since most users aren’t willing or able to have that awareness in the first place.

The way this should work is you click on things you want in a package manager and then those are present and available transparently whether you use them or not. That goes for all OSs.

Hell, even Android’s semi-automatic hybernating of unused apps is a step too close to my face, as far as I’m concerned.

Yeah, we’re almost there. If you buy a pre-packaged box with Home Assistant you’re most of the way there. If you look under the hood most commercial NAS options and even some routers are scraping that territory as well.

I think the way it needs to work to go mainstream is you buy some box that you plug in to your router and it just sets up a handful of (what looks to you) like web services you can access from anywhere. No more steps needed.

The biggest blockers right now are that everybody in that space is too worried giving you the appearance of control and customizability to go that hard towards end-user focus… and that for some reason we as a planet are still dragging our feet on easily accessible permanent addresses for average users and still relying on hacks and workarounds.

The tech is there, though. You could be selling home server alternatives to the could leaning into enshittification annoyance with the tech we have today. There’s just nobody trying to do an iServe because everybody is chasing that subscription money instead, and those who aren’t are FOSS nerds that want their home server stuff to look weird and custom and hard.

Yeah, that’s exactly where it comes from. And it fits just fine for people like you, doing it for a living. It’s just a bit obnoxious when us normies dabbling with what is now fairly approachable hobbyist home networking try to cosplay as that. I mean, come on, Brad, you’re not unwinding after work with more server stuff, you just have a Plex and a Pi-hole you mess around with while avoiding having actual face time with your family.

And that’s alright, by the way. I think part of why the nomenclature makes me snarky is that I actually think we’re on the cusp of this stuff being very doable by everybody at scale. People are still running small services in dedicated Raspberry Pis and buying proprietary NASs that can do a bunch of one-button self-hosting. If you gave it a good push you could start marketing self-contained home server boxes as a mainstream product, it’s just that the people doing that are more concerned with selling you a bunch of hard drives and the current batch of midcore users like me are more than happy to go on about their “homelab” and pretend they’re doing a lot more work than they actually are to keep their couple of docker containers running.

Yeeeeah, I have less of a problem for that, because… well yeah, people host stuff for you all the time, right? Any time you’re a client the host is someone else. Self-hosting makes some sense for services where you’re both the host and the client.

Technically you’re not self hosting anything for your family in that case, you’re just… hosting it, but I can live with it.

I do think this would all go down easier if we had a nice marketable name for it. I don’t know, power-internetting, or “the information superdriveway”. This was all easier in the 90s, I guess is what I’m accidentally saying.

This is a me thing and not related to this video specifically, but I absolutely hate that we’ve settled on “homelab” as a term for “I have software in some computer I expose to my home network”.

It makes sense if you are also a system administrator of an online service and you’re testing stuff before you deploy it, but a home server isn’t a “lab” for anything, it’s the final server you’re using and don’t plan to do anything else with. Your kitchen isn’t a “test kitchen” just because you’re serving food to your family.

Sorry, pet peeve over. The video is actually ok.

And maybe I could get to some more in-depth solution that sorts it out, but that’s me spending time on a problem that a) I shouldn’t have to, and b) I have a functional workaround for already.

Communal troubleshooting is the nature of Linux desktop, but also a massive problem. You shouldn’t need communal troubleshooting in the first place. It’s not a stand-in for proper UX, hardware compatibility or reliable implementation. If the goal is for more people to migrate to Linux the community needs to get over the assumption that troubleshooting is a valid answer to these types of issues.

Which is not to say the community shouldn’t be helpful, but there’s this tendency to aggressively troubleshoot at people complaining about issues and limitations and then to snark at people actively asking for help troubleshooting for not reading documentation or not providing thorough enough logs and information. I find that obnoxious, admittedly because it’s been decades, so I may be on a hair trigger for it at this point.

The other option is to just use Windows, which is the issue with these types of hardware incompatibility. I also have an ASUS laptop that won’t use their slightly weird speakers correctly and, again, that whole thing makes it much less practical to boot into Linux instead.

I tried fiddling with the Windows settings, but that didn’t fix it immediately, and the sound is clearly wrong on Linux even with a power cycle. And googling for it I’m not alone in having issues and support for the thing is patchy. I mean, rebooting should have fixed it anyway. There’s no reason why either OS wouldn’t initialize those things on boot.

I am not particularly commited to the thing, so I wouldn’t buy an upgrade. The only reason I have it is at some point I ended up with a motherboard that wouldn’t do 5.1 out of the box, so I got something relatively affordable to slap in there. It sounds noticeably better than integrated audio, though, so now that I have it I’d like to use it, even if I’m not on the problematic old motherboard.

But again, I dislike the tendency to recommend functional hardware or technical support. It’s kinda frustrating. And frankly, it works on Windows, so if I was looking for a fix, that’s right there. The onus is on Linux for support in this type of setup where the issue is not on the Windows side that’s a reboot away.

That’s fair, and I don’t have a problem with that. I’m just annoyed by the tendency of the community to react to criticism with technical advice, which I find to be a frustrating crutch.

FWIW, the card is a Sound Blaster X AE5 (that name sure has aged poorly), and I’ve had similar issues with it in both a Manjaro and a Bazzite install.

Nah, it’s just not supported. Or rather, it’s poorly supported so it sounds worse than in Windows and it just doesn’t want to properly dual boot without a power cycle. Honestly, I haven’t checked if the soft reboot issue has been reported. Pretty sure it hasn’t. I could be nice and go find where to file a bug, but I haven’t gotten around to it and, frankly, there are enough other problems with this particular setup that nobody is fixing and are getting dismissed with “it’s the manufacturer’s fault” that I’m not particularly inclined to go out of my way.

We don’t talk enough about how spotty new motherboard support is for Linux, either. At least sound is a recurring talking point. But yeah, newer motherboards often don’t pick up networking and audio hardware out of the box and need a lot of troubleshooting. Everybody is so proud of how well Linux revitalizes old laptops but nobody likes to talk about how that’s because they’re old, and newer stuff may not work well or at all. Early adopting hardware platforms on Linux can be a “going on an adventure” Hobbit meme experience.

And you’re right that it’s not so much about audio getting reingeneered again as it getting done right. I just don’t know that the current patchwork barely holding together can be salvaged by bolting more pieces on top. Every time Linux needs to replace something this way it’s a years-long argument between nerds and a whole damn mess (see Wayland still being litigated, somehow). Audio never gets enough attention anywhere and I have very low trust that a new attempt wouldn’t end up in the same mess they have now, at least for a long while. It extra sucks because Windows audio used to be kinda bad, but now it’s… kinda not? So being a dual-booter it’s just an extra reason to make that choice of which boot option to pick from the menu.

We’re not doing this. People in the Linux community are so tweaked by years of bad support that they assume every complaint is a call for help.

It is not.

I know what’s broken, I know why, I know it’s not easily fixable, I have a workaround. This is not a tech support thread.

I don’t need information from users more savvy than me, I need the bad sound firmware they’re loading in lieu of specific support for my audio card to be fixed, or even better, replaced by actual specifically supported firmware so my card works. In the meantime, crappy on-board audio and wasting money on hardware I’m not using it is.

You would friggin’ think.

And yet.

Turns out a DAC is a fairly complicated and self-sufficient bundle of software and hardcore electrical circuitry, so apparently you can mess it up so badly it will remain broken across soft reboots. Who knew!

So in my dual boot setup Linux messes up the dedicated audio card so bad it not only sounds like ass on Linux but it somehow garbles Windows audio until I power cycle the entire thing. It is entirely possible it does permanent damage to the hardware. Some of the electrical clicks you hear from it are genuinely concerning.

Had to plug in Linux audio via the motherboard audio and use different sources for each OS to work around it.

Does change how the meme reads to me.

Also, maaaan does Linux need to completely redo its audio systems from the ground up. It’s so bad that saying that isn’t even that controversial, which is insane in these circles.

I think your read on what people typically do with Plex probably doesn’t align with reality. I also think in the end you’re way less optimistic about the potential of open source software than I am. There are multiple areas where OSS options are either dominant or very competitive, but I am also clearly way less picky about how that gradient of openness to commerciality than you are. We can agree that it’s fine that there are options for both or all steps in that gradient, but there is a ton of snark and all-or-nothing attitude in that community as well.

I will say that If you have a commercial option like Plex and a couple of open alternatives (say Kodi and Jellyfin for the sake of argument) I would prefer one of those to have the type of UX that can compete with the closed commercial product because you can compete with open alternatives.

If jellyfin adopted HA’s model of paid development, I’d be thrilled. But HA’s strategy is actually pretty unique, it’ll take time for that structure to be stress-tested and propagate.

Well, hey, there we agree, then. I’d say that the setup for HA is actually fairly Mozilla-like, and people don’t seem thrilled with THAT, so it wasn’t a given you’d agree. Plex certainly isn’t that. For one thing it’s commercial and closed source. But crucially HA’s commercial branch WILL have a bunch of your data, including voice processing and login info, if you do buy into their paid subscription service.

As for the rest of the argument, most is redundant so I’m not gonna go through the loop again, I am actually busy. But I will add a few things. For one thing, whether I think FOSS is worth “any level of inconvenience” is irrelevant. I do, and I do live with the inconvenience in some cases. But if the goal is for FOSS to be mainstream and a primary choice (and it can absolutely be, there are plenty of examples), then it doesn’t matter what I think. The reason the privacy tradeoffs make sense for Plex is that Plex is an app your family is likely to use. Mine does, and they sure won’t put up with bad UX for the sake of using an open alternative. OBS didn’t crush Xsplit out of the market because of ideology, it did it because it became more powerful, usable and reliable.

And let me clarify I don’t “blow smoke for Plex”. I opened this whole subthread by saying I wanted to use Jellyfin (hence all the testing we’ve been nitpicking about) but couldn’t justify it. I’ve said this above. I’d drop Plex in a heartbeat if Jellyfin was just as good to use for me and the rest of my household. But it isn’t. There’s no reason to blow smoke for Plex, but there is a reason to not delusionally pretend that open source alterantives are better than they are. You’re not going to gaslight normies into using them that way and the complacency just makes it less likely for them to succeed at what they’re trying to do. It is, after all, the year of Linux desktop.

I mean, my Plex server is on a Fedora machine, it seems to be doing fine. I have gotten into arguments here about how frustrating it is that Linux advocates pretend every usability problem for Windows users is solved and that “just use Mint” is a valid solution to that issue. If you want to know how that goes, it goes a lot like this conversation.

On topic, using any external login or remote access third party service for your self hosted services is a significant change in how much info is not controlled by you, nobody is arguing that. There’s a conversation to be had about whether that’s worth it for most users. Like I said earlier, is it a good thing for Home Assistant to provide a paid subscription service that will handle that for you? For most people I’d say yes, it’s still a much safer, more flexible alternative to Google’s or Amazon’s ecosystem, so why not? Baby steps.

But if you’re already using a commercial service that already has a proprietary login then no, it doesn’t matter. Plex already knows which clients go to your server. It does not need Google for anything here, having Google’s SSO doesn’t give them any information they already have. It does give that to Google, but if your concern is the cops are going to bang on your door for all your illegal pixels that you stream then you’re just as boned. It’s borderline irresponsible to pretend otherwise.

As for the “I have nothing to hide” thing… look, if you want to have this argument with someone else go pester them instead. It’s not “I have nothing to hide”, it’s “this commercial service that I use does something that is legal and I intend to both take advantage of that and defend my right to own my media”. How you get “I have nothing to hide” out of that is your own pretzel logic.

I have a right to store, backup and access my own media and to keep a copy of it for private use. I will exercise that right regardless of how many US corpos pretend that hey own the very concept of showing video to people. I am doing nothing illegal here and of the perfectly legal software options to do this perfectly legal thing I chose the one that had better usability for my family to be comfortable using it. This comes at the cost of an external service storing some of our data, just like our Netlfix and Disney+ subscriptions do, but since I’m not keeping a media server performatively that is a tradeoff we have made on a bunch of places because not everybody who lives here is willing to do homework to be able to use their devices. That cool with you?

For the record, I don’t have any misgivings about FOSS as a concept. I do have remarkable contempt for people who want it to keep being a minority option because they like being in the secret treehouse and don’t want everybody else learning about it. Widespread, successful FOSS doesn’t look like half-baked UX and hobbyist programmers working for nothing in their spare time, and I would certainly like to see a landscape where alongisde hobby projects we have a solid stable of financially sustainable professionally made open source alternatives that anybody can get into. Jellyfin isn’t even the worse offender here. If nothing else it’s frustrating because it could be a more approachable sustainable alternative in the vein of your Blenders or Home Assistants… but it’s kinda not, and that sucks.

You are saying many things about the legality of this, especially internationally and regarding what Plex is or isn’t obligated to do, that are a bit of a stretch. But man, are they put in context by the admission of left wing cosplay there at the end where you concede you do think “a little bit of crime is good, actually”, which explains a lot of the hack the world mentality and why you feel so cool and dangerous by sharing some torrents you got with a slightly larger group of people than your direct family.

I still do think that’s counterproductive if you ever want a scenario where the late-capitalist media distribution landscape gets at least a modicum of competition from more reasonable and sustainable alternatives. That you prefer to feel edgy than to propose a viable scenario for that is all well and good, but I wish you didn’t feel the need to do that at people.

For the record, you are still wrong about SSO. Again it makes sense that if you’re cosplaying cops and robbers “this thing bad, this thing bad, both together worse” sounds reasonable, but if you really were at risk of any real legal liability that’s really not how that would play out. In the real world ANY leak of that information from any source would be an absolute problem. So the Google login could be a problem by itself, and the Plex data gathering would be a much bigger problem by itself, but both together would just mean you are exactly as screwed as with just one.

But you think it’s cool to crap on Google (which I guess it is) and are cosplaying, so that’s a cool thing to perform outrage about even if it doesn’t really matter in this scenario. Which I’m increasingly realizing is all this conversation is about, from the “I’m so good at networking and system administration” braggadocio to the “I’m such a dangerous anarchist criminal that doesn’t give a crap about the rules because I’m so good they can’t catch me” stuff.

FWIW, I do care about self-hosting as a viable commercial alternative and about a legal framework to support it, but even if I didn’t think it was possible (which it is, and some people at least are working along those lines) I am not ready to give up on the changes required to get there just to feel cool on the Internet. You do you, though, just… try not to scare the normies away. Not that there are any normies around here anyway, so I guess we’re safe on that front.

Man, you keep thinking that taking digs about how it’s all a skill issue is either an argument or an insult, and I keep reminding you that even if there was a skill issue at play (and there wasn’t), being hard or annoying to use is the actual problem. If your UX allows for skill issues in making a straightforward setup run then it’s a UX issue.

Also, me using Plex to host copies of my own media legally is not the same as operating a P2P service. But if it’s any consolation I have no intention to set foot on that hellhole anyway, given that US authorities seem to not need copyright overreach to throw you in a room with no windows indefinitely these days. Good luck with that.

Oh, and yes, those are mutually exclusive. Or mutually inclusive, to be more accurate. If your concern is the govenrment overreach implications of having a portion of your data leaked, worrying about a smaller leak along the way of actively generating a larger leak is entirely pointless. Conversely, I’d argue that if you have a dozen users and are terrified that the cops are going to come and raid the… I’m gonna say meth lab you’re running on the side, we’re back to the conversation about how cool you are with that dozen users having their Jellyfin clients running on a bunch of Android devices, Smart TVs, Windows boxes or whatever else.

Again, I keep struggling with the irony of this weird position having entirely bought into the narrative that self-hosting media is inherently illegal or dangerous. I came into this argument from the UX angle, you guys are increasingly convincing me that a significant disincentive for self-hosting to become mainstream is that its entire community is convinced that they are doing something wrong, apparently. It’s not that I hadn’t noticed how central to the whole thing a bunch of P2P-specific paraphernalia happens to be, but I wasn’t ready for the gatekeeping to come with a side of edgy 90s we’re-so-bad hack-the-world stuff.

I think you’re giving their ability to coordinate too much credit. Best guess the ISPs are just withholding anything that requires investment to deploy or that they can monetize themselves. Everybody else is just bottom-feeding by selling workarounds wherever the ISPs can’t or won’t.

The invisible hand of the market sucks at creating optimal solutions, but it does great at creating scammy crap that will take your money, no conspiracy necessary.