SearXNG is in the picture and it’s one of the 3 recommended.

They mention they’re only doing things locally, and looking into using tailscale, so they aren’t exposing to public web and the security concerns you mention are a lot less important.

Windows 10 long term servicing channel. It’s intended for things like electronic signs but works great if you just want un bloated windows. It comes with most of the random bullshit not installed and has a longer period of security updates.

Hardware whitelist is unholy

People ‘know’ how to use Microsoft products. I’m a data guy and might spend less than a day a week in word, PowerPoint, excel. Most of the time I spend in them is checking other people’s work. I’m still called on to help people with such tasks as switching from footnotes to endnotes, moving files in SharePoint, fixing formatting. My general knowledge of navigating the UI and googling fixes is better than what people ‘know’.

I think they’re saying they’ve already signed into a Google account, downloaded play store apps, and set everything up. Afterwards, they have disconnected the Chromecast from the internet and successfully continued to access their self hosted content.

Oh! Appreciate the tip. I’ll investigate this weekend

No worries! I’ve used the calibre app for ebooks in the past and it does quite well.

I use the Audiobookshelf app from AdvPlyr on the play store. I’ve been meaning to try Lissen since it’s on F-Droid, but I tried this to make sure my partner didn’t have any issues.

If I’m using it on my PC I just connect to the web UI.

I connect on all my devices with tailscale. My partner uses the same but has apparently been having issues with her phone not being able to access the tailnet when not on the same LAN. It’s not so bad though, the Audiobookshelf app lets her download her books. This works better anyway, since she travels for work and often has no service anyway.

I use abs and it’s great. My partner listens to audiobooks, I read ebooks. You just have them side by side in the library, and in the audiobookshelf android app you can choose between stream or read. You also don’t need to store them side by side, the metadata can put them together clientside anyway. I guess this would be the way to go if you thought you might try a diff ebook hosting service later.

If all you do with your ebooks is read them, I daresay you’ll have no issues because I haven’t. Supports volume controls for page turn and that’s all that I want.

Second Baikal, I’m using docker on nixos through compose2nix and it’s great for syncing both my calendar and my tasks.org todo lists. Crazy easy to setup as well.

Not nobara related but I found a Linux Mint thread about using xinput to adjust config to have left handed mode enabled for 1 mouse but not another. Maybe that will help. If they’re wireless mice with dongles, maybe they’re struggling in that one mouse is connecting to both receivers? If they offer both bt and wifi pairing you might be able to get around it by manipulating that, or if they can be plugged in that might help.

Does your monitor have speakers, or a headphone jack? Interested to see if the sound works that way. And very silly question, have you tried a different wire/device in the audio jack or only the one?

This is a great specific response based on the principle in my comment. Thank you for taking the time for OP and others. I feel like the Vega iGPU on the ryzen 5xxx is meant to be pretty good too right?

Do you mean being dependent on people having “done it in nix before” so you can copy it? Definitely true to some extent. The language takes a bit of getting used to. Haven’t watched the video so idk context, but if using docker on nix there’s a great tool called compose2nix that converts compose files for docker or podman into declarative nix files. That took a lot of the challenge away for me personally.

I would say with all of these recommendations, you can probably look to find an AM4 motherboard and user ddr4 instead of ddr5 ram secondhand. If you play heavily modded Minecraft, ddr4 ram will be much more affordable to opt for 64 GB if you want to allocate 20-30gb and keep a lot free still. AM4 motherboards cover a large range of CPUs up to ryzen 5xxx I think. there’s a lot of room for upgrades if you can only find one of the older CPUs. I jumped from a 2700x to a 3900x recently and it’s been great

Edit: only just read your future proof comment. Older parts may not be the way to go then, since you’re restricting upgrades to things which already exist Edit again: I thought about it some more and I think this tier of parts is actually future proof, in that it should do the things you said you’re interested in doing into the foreseeable future

Why not? People are generally always online these days and there is a lot of music out there, plenty to fill a phone many times over. Granted you might only have a few hours worth of tracks at any time but there is obviously at least one person (OP) who doesn’t.

Not to mention the way they manage their library sounds incredibly desktop oriented. This removes the need to plugin the phone.

And then like Plex/jellyfin, or audiobookshelf, sounds like this let’s you have a shared library across devices or people, even better!

Can I please query the win10/11 because it’s a shared console? What about it being a) shared or b) a console makes win 10/11 a requirement?

A consistent console-ish experience with pc-like access to games is more a case for Bazzite or steamos than a case for windows.

A commute-by-car is a great time to charge a smart watch, too.

Audiobookshelf supports EPUB files and other ebook formats. You can put them alongside audiobooks (offering a UI option to either read or listen) or use purely ebooks although obviously a little overkill if you aren’t using the audio features at all