Does Incus allow you to use a VM with a GUI? One thing that’s nice about Proxmox is I have one VM with a very basic lxqt setup for when I need that, and I can either use remote-viewer + the spice protocol to access it or access it through the Proxmox web ui. That’s been very handy.

Pi-hole is one of my favorite pieces of software. It is the reason I began self-hosting six years ago.

Unfortunately I can’t play around with it anymore because I live a thousand miles away from everyone I support who actually uses Jellyfin. My experience with the Android TV app was embedded SRT subtitle support is now 100% good as of late last year, but embedded PGS trips things up so much that I cannot use them.

Sublime never offered lifetime subscriptions. https://web.archive.org/web/20150928064400/http://www.sublimetext.com/sales_faq You can even see as far back as 2014 that if you purchased Sublime Text 2 when Sublime 3 was still in beta:

• Upgrade Policy
  A license is valid for Sublime Text 3, and includes all point updates, as well as access to prior versions (e.g., Sublime Text 2). Future major versions, such as Sublime Text 4, will be a paid upgrade.
• Expiration Date
  Licenses purchased for Sublime Text 3 do not expire, however an upgrade fee will be required for Sublime Text 4.

You can find that disagreeable, but it was not something they hid from us customers.

I don’t use it for myself but my experience with Jellyfin is the subtitles UX kind of sucks. It got a lot better on the Android TV app recently (ty to the maintainer!), particularly with improved subtitle support, but because of ExoPlayer it still can’t play bitmapped embedded subtitles easily, only .srt subtitles.

The experience on iOS/appletv with Jellyfin/Swiftfin was so bad that I ended up recommending Infuse. Infuse is a great app, but it’s not a libre app, which kind of clashes with the rest of Jellyfin in that regard. And, once again, it needs massaging: unless you want to be popped up with a buy Infuse Pro pop-up your video and audio has to be in certain codecs.

As I said, I don’t use these things, myself. I don’t even have a TV. But every now and again, I will put a file up for some relatives, and I want it to be totally directly playable, because my server is just an old laptop. So I have to spend a lot of manual time making sure the files are juuuuust right. If there comes a day where there’s direct playback with embedded PGS or SRT subtitles on all platforms that will be the day the Jellyfin suite of software becomes 10/10 software for me.

It’s not absolutely shit, it’s a Thinkpad t440s with an i7 and 8gigs of RAM and a completely broken trackpad that I ordered to use as a PC when my desktop wasn’t working in 2018. Started with a bare server OS then quickly realized the value of virtualization and deployed Proxmox on it in 2019. Have been using it as a modest little server ever since. But I realize it’s now 10 years old. And it might be my server for another 5 years, or more if it can manage it.

In the host OS I tweaked some value to ensure the battery never charges over 80%. And while I don’t know exactly how much electricity it consumes on idle, I believe it’s not too much. Works great for what I want. The most significant issue is some error message that I can’t remember the text of that would pop up, I think related to the NIC. I guess Linux and the NIC in this laptop have/had some kind of mutual misunderstanding.

Really looks like Liquid has GG’s number so far in this series (middle of game 2)

What do you mean about the Charles Manson remark? Is there some hidden evil I don’t know about?

The one caveat to building is if you build a PC and a single component is faulty, you are now responsible for determining which component is to get the RMA done. That can be a big hassle. One time for me it was actually two different components that needed to be replaced by the manufacturers, and that was a pain to figure out.

Proxmox host. Fedora server vm.

• openvpn as a backup (and because i went through the highly laborious process of setting it up)
• wireguard
• nitter (twitter alternative frontend. makes twitter usable)
• audiobookshelf (podcast manager)
• pihole (block ads by dns)
• nginx for my website and some related website stuff
• Vaultwarden (sometimes. I usually keep it off because I prefer KeepassXC anyway)

The hardware is a 10 year old Thinkpad. I think it’s pretty clear by my software list that I don’t ask it to do much, but it does so much for me. Like, I wouldn’t run Jellyfin off of this thing. In fact my NAS is 4x8TB drives but I keep it mostly shut off. It’s powered on maybe about once or twice a week for a few hours at a time. I try to batch my activity with it. Like “oh, yeah, I want file X but it’s on my NAS. Maybe later, when I have a need for file Y I will turn it on and retrieve both.”

I can achieve everything I want with even lower spec hardware, but this Thinkpad has a faulty trackpad anyway, which is also how I got it for cheap. I have never measured it, but supposedly it consumes around 6W at idle which is low enough for me.

I do this exact same setup but one thing to add to your answer and be aware of is that syncthing is not a backup solution. If you delete the files on one computer, those files will be deleted on the other synced devices. And accidents can happen.

So, as always, take backups.