What’s the catch, why don’t we use those? I/O speed? Limited read/write cycles? I imagine it sucks if you need files on opposite ends of the tape.

A lot of people saying ditch the Pi, but it’s fairly viable depending on what exactly you want from it, so long as you get one of the newer models with plenty of RAM. Simply streaming media is relatively manageable for a Pi. It will most likely run Navidrome okay, and Jellyfin will be okay if and only if media doesn’t need to be transcoded, and you MIGHT have issues with 4K, not sure. If you stream to something like a smart TV or Fire Stick, those can typically only handle certain video formats, so if your media isn’t that type, either the server transcodes it, which the probably Pi can’t do fast enough, or playback fails. Music typically doesn’t require transcoding, so that’s why I think Navidrome should be okay. Pi-Hole is manageable and is, after all, expressly designed to be run on a Pi. It can also be run on standard hardware, so while you can do it on a Pi, you don’t need one to use Pi-Hole.

Now, that said, two main concerns about a Pi. The first is that you’ll probably eventually want to host and do more, and you may run out of resources and wish you’d just gotten a cheap mini PC instead. The second is that you really should get an external HDD or something to store as much as you can on, preferably including the OS. An SD card just is not meant to handle the constant I/O that comes with being the main drive for a full computer. It’ll eventually fail, taking all the data on it with it. I think the best way to run off an external HDD has changed since I used a Pi, so some research recommended, but what I did before was flash the EXACT SAME image to the SD card and HDD, then delete the boot partition on the HDD, expand the data partition to fill the HDD, and delete the data partition off the SD card. If you use the exact same image for both, it at least used to be that the partitions keep the same UUID, so it boots from the SD card as normal, and when told to find the other partition by UUID, it finds it on the other drive and works just fine.

Yeah, and there’s a reason a lot of us are unlikely to even try them. If I still bought consoles, the first one that did this would be the last I ever bought, and I’m not buying it if it’s like that from the start.

Some hosts block it by default, but if you ask, they’ll open it up no problem.

If they’ll go for it, the most reliable way will be to offer them extra email addresses on your mail server. Sometimes, when a mail provider decides they don’t trust an incoming email, they don’t mark it as spam or reject it and send a notification response. They just… Silently drop it without ever mentioning it to sender or recipient. The only genuinely reliable way I’ve heard to build and maintain the reputation to avoid that is to send way more mail than a few individuals can manage, even with your services sending notifications. Theoretically, you can do it with really low mail volume if you jump through a whole bunch of hoops, but nothing is really guaranteed long term.

I think the path to that looks like growing the middle class, just not stopping until it totally consumes the poorer class.

Nah, the middle class is shriveling up because we tolerate meager taxes on the ultra rich and stagnant wages. Fix the tax code and form some unions, and I think you’d be surprised how much the middle class could rebound.

A near-frontier quality AI told me using IoT would free up about 1-2gb of ram compared to Windows 11.

Oh, well as long as it was a high quality hallucination machine that told you that.

If you really want to get rid of your dual boot but need Windows, you could set up a virtual machine running Windows. You need a bit of a nicer machine to deal with the overhead, but it’s not so bad as people assume a lot of the time. As long as you don’t need the GPU for what you’re doing, I think it’s even pretty easy to give the VM direct access to the base hardware it needs, which cuts a fair bit of overhead. It may or may not get fairly technical to set up, depending on your hardware, distro, and personal luck, but it might be viable.

Have you tried stuff like WINE? I thought I’d heard of people using FL Studio without much issue, but I may be confusing it with another program.

Damn, I knew it had problems with room stability, but that’s kinda completely ridiculous.