And that is exactly why I bought an M2 Air this year, price vs performance nothing beats the MacBooks at the moment.

lack of easy access to advanced utilities

Me and you have very different experiences to this, at work I’ve found MacOS the easiest of the three to sort out.

I’ll give you a recent windows example, A PC comes in for repair with a b450 MSI board no audio on the Front panel or the rear I/O. Naturally we install all the drivers off the MSI web page except windows won’t even detect the sound card. Throw on a Linux USB live environment instantly detected.

Naturally we’re like no worries let’s use the inbuilt Windows tool to reset the PC with a cloud download, nope that doesn’t fix it. Required a complete reinstall from a USB. This was windows 10 22h2 iirc.

At work I see Windows/Mac/Linux daily and Windows, gives me the most trouble on a daily basis. With Mac/Linux most things you can fix from the terminal pretty quickly, or with Mac just use the inbuilt reset tool no matter how much a customer fucks up their machine.

I haven’t needed to tech support on any of my Apple stuff in the entire time I’ve owned them, I have at home both a Linux server and a Mac mini running as a headless server. Guess how many times I’ve had to fix the Mac mini 0.

My iPhone I’ve had 0 issues with and my M2 Air which I use for work has had 0 issues.

I don’t really see a situation where the sorting out a mac would be troublesome it’s pretty much all simple as hell.

Oh and fun fact, I have done tech support for apple stuff on a daily basis as part of my job as a store manager of a retail tech store and I’m constantly thrown problems from Android/iOS Devcies as well as MacOS, Linux & Windows Devices and guess which ones give me the most problems.

Sure and with that trade off I have a rock solid experience with no issues at all.

Sometimes you get tired of android and the jank and want shit that just works so you can get on with your day and just focus on other things.

Cause I use an Apple TV and an iPhone?

Piracy and software was already really easy to use a decade ago ( sick beard / couch potato ) it’s just that the services at the time were good enough that you could watch practically everything on Netflix +1 so it wasn’t really a problem to stomach the cost. now I need 7 different subscriptions to watch shows I’m interested in which is a ball ache

For YouTube premium I just did the whole vpn to turkey and pay for a year upfront which was like £12 for the year

If you have a pi kicking around or a docker instance of pihole you can use it to take over dhcp of the router and then set the dns servers in pihole.

That’s what I do currently on my home hub

I refused to buy Apple products for 15 years. Recently I grabbed a whole set of them and honestly, there’s only one thing I can say. It just fucking works.

I’ve been using Linux/Windows for the better part of two decades and I’m just at a point where I don’t care to tinker anymore unless I have to, I just wanna have stuff that works especially when it’s related to work stuff. Apple stuff is just reliable in that sense, oh my Android phone decided to crash on itself? Yeah my iPhone has had 0 crashes all year I’ve owned it. My M2 Macbook Air has superior battery life and portability at a more reasonable price than pretty much any competitor on the market?

Yes certain Apple things are beyond stupid expensive, Hello Apple TV 4K 128gb being £180 on launch?

But when I want something to work and not have to think about it, the apple stuff fits that need.

What would you describe as large?

The company I work for is a multinational at this point and exclusively uses Google for Mail/Docs. We have I think 600 stores now across 12 countries.

Usenet guy here so no real ratio, my downloads for this month so far are:

The total is since end of Feb iirc.

I’m already locked in, I have to use google products daily for work as my work email and drive is all done through google. There’s no moving off that unless I leave my job and even then there’s no guarantee.

Fuck man, this blows.

I haven’t seen all of them in person, but the other day someone showed me the StarLite which is their budget laptop and honestly it really surprised me. The only thing with similar build quality I’ve seen at such a low price was the google pixel book go which can be had used absurdly cheap.

I think they’re the company I’d use to buy Linux laptops if I used one daily, these days I use a MacBook Air m2 simply because the battery life beats all and for how I work that’s what I need most.

If you’re genuinely looking for Linux Laptops I’d take a look at https://starlabs.systems/pages/starfighter

There’s also https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/index.php

It’s definitely progress and seeing myself in one of the top results was nice but it’s going to take a lot more work and tbh the decentralised nature of the links might also hurt because clicking on the dbzero link looks like a hackerman link if you know what I mean

Yeah I’ve noticed my library has changed quite a bit and my storage needs are going to have to increase thanks to friends and family but is what it is.

I’ll look into overseer but seems like a lot more work than doplarr to setup

The most useful comment in this entire thread, the search results are a bit of a mess currently and that’s a huge stumbling block.

I tried a simple search query with lemmy and the way results come back is not good

it’s going to take a long time for that to change but just as a casual user I doubt I’d click anything past the first few reddit links.

It’s also why most people suggest multiple server providers on different backbones that solves that issue most of the time.

usenet is almost always faster, there’s never an issue with torrent lacking seeds and it’s theoretically safer as you do not upload any content when downloading which if you do download a lot using torrents will put you in a certain legal grey area about distributing files.

but aside from all of that the integration with the arr stack and the automation makes it just so much more god damned convenient.

I use Eweka/usenetprime and use Nzbplanet/NzbGeek these days.

You can get plenty of older shows on Usenet it’s not like you won’t find something like Star Trek from the 60’s. Hell I recently started downloading V from 1984 so…

For my less tech savvy friends/family I just have a bot in Discord that can do requests to sonarr/radarr https://github.com/kiranshila/Doplarr

Other options can be using something like tailscale and giving them the web access to sonarr/radarr

100% get 2 providers 2 indexers and setup the Arr stack and never touch it again

this is me also, I’ve used transmission for over a decade across three operating systems it’s incredibly simple to get going but relatively powerful if you need it to be.

Originally I had planned to do what you’re doing and use a mini PC to upgrade from my pi4 eventually what I did was get a Mac Mini and keep the pi for pihole and dhcp.

Not saying you should get a Mac mini m2 but the power consumption was the main push for me to go down that route cause remember you’re running the thjng 24/7 for years and depending where you live electricity isn’t cheap. (I pay 32.5p per kWh)

Considering the cost the same as a decently mid range mini pc (i got mine for £500 new) it makes sense.

If you’re looking at a cheaper budget try finding something at least 8th gen intel and up for better power savings

Can anyone tell me the advantage of selfhosting Lemmy?

I have my Raspberry Pi which is only doing pihole atm and I’ve got an M2 Mac mini with some spare resources with docker installed so I’ve got hardware for it but what does it actually do?

Honestly Plex/Emby/Jellyfin whichever you prefer is a gamechanger because if you have a large library of content then it just cuts the cord from the subscription services.

I’ve always been happy to pay for them until I went on holiday last January and realised that none of my services were working due to going to a country that was out of the way and the only way to access them was to use a VPN.

So having my own Netflix is a great thing.

Tailscale while doing the above is also really cool