The doorbell is gone. I replaced it with a different one that works locally. At this point it’s just the a keypad I need to acquire. I agree with you that I should vote with my dollar. It seems that there aren’t a lot of options. I see a round radial-like one out there from a few different sellers but there’s really a dearth of information. Perhaps I’ll have to dig a bit more. Other than the HA forum, is there anywhere in particular you would recommend looking?

Not a mean question at all. I haven’t had more difficulty keeping a working system than I did on Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, etc. I get everything I need in Arch and the packages are always fresh off the grill. I also like the emphasis on text config files and a ground-up install. That helped me better understand my system and how it works.

No idea about performance. My performance recommendation is “don’t run Windows!” :)

You are correct. That wasn’t the most descriptive statement on my part :D

The black Reolink WiFi doorbell one was what I purchased. I was tempted by the PoE one because it would avoid using WiFi bandwidth but there’s no cable in that area.

My partner had a preference for the wider FOV so I got the black one. It paired no problem and after banging my head against the wall for a while I got the stream working in Home Assistant, VLC, then Frigate. I haven’t decided how I want to handle the recording. I have yet to set up notifications and I’m not certain if my doorbell circuit is providing enough power, which would explain why the Bezos Bell sucked at keeping a charge (also surveiling your customers all day takes a lot of juice). This may become a slightly bigger project if I have to rerun the wiring.

There was a lot of hype around this bell and that naturally makes me skeptical, but rarely have I had a device pair and get to a functional state that quickly, even in most proprietary apps. We’ll see how it works out once I have it wired in.

Yeah, easier is better. I’ll have to confirm what apps outside of Jellyfin and Chromecast are needed, but I’ll compare some basic Roku devices. I could probably score one a online neighborhood marketplace for a few bucks.

Thanks for weighing in.

I noticed the same thing with KDE and Wayland. Sometimes my curser still grows 10 sizes or shrinks as I pass over certain windows or between monitors but things are more consistent and predictable than they used to be.

My Minecraft pals used mumble at various points. It’s less polished than some options. I like the FOSS and the simplicity but the certificates confused me as a noob. Would still recommend.

I was curious about that. I settled on the black one for my space, though I haven’t ordered yet and I probably would also be happy with white. There is a long straight wall to the right of my door, so I need basically no FOV to the right and the left can sweep the whole yard in the background.

I do sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade

Is there any reason to not combine the commands since the output always prompts prior to changes anyway?

The cables seem to increase exponentially don’t they? First, you have a few computers and a half dozen cables powering things and linking everything together, then you add a couple servers, maybe a second nic on your NAS, and another switch or two since things are now further from the router. Suddenly your office looks like a giant bowl of spaghetti covered in prop 65 stickers.

I run a beelink mini, not the weakest one, not the most powerful one, and it handles docker containers and VMs fine. I don’t have a tkn of integrated storage, but rather this machine handles apps while a separate NAS does all the file storage. Most I ever had running was 2 VMs and a handful of negligible docker containers but I still had plenty of ram and CPU to spare. I also think the minisforum stuff looks good. Their n5 pro nas just came out and would have made a good server with room to grow. I decided against it because I have parts and I want to use them :-) so the beelink is holding down the fort while I Frankenstein together a rig from my old gaming PC in a huge case that will host all my apps and less critical media. Home assistant which will stay on the beelink because it needs high availability. I’ve been curious how the lowest priced minisforum models would fare.

Strawberry is great and so was Clementine before it. It’s really a step up compared to what the average distro bakes into their default bundle of applications.

Interesting username. Are you a fellow student of Internet Comment Etiquette?

I know at least some of my containers use Postgres. Glad to know I inadvertently might have made it easier on myself. I’ll have to look into the users for the db and db containers. I’m a bit lost on that. I know my db has a username and pass I set in the docker compose file and that the process is running with a particular GID UID or whatever. Is that what your talking about?

I miss this from cloud hosting. It’s helpful to be able to save, clone, or do whatever with the current machine state and easily just flash back to where you were if you mess something up. Might be too much to set up for my current homelab though. My server does have btrfs snapshots of everything directly in grub which has let me roll back a few big screwups here and there.

That was my first thought. How do you keep it cold enough to run in a place like Arizona, Spain, or Mexico? It also reminded me of my Windows Mobile days before I had a smartphone when someone on a Windows Mobile forum took a Dell Axim x51v and built a dock for it that exposed all the ports so he could use it with an external display as an infotainment/nav system. He called it the Aximizer. An old android phone with a micro-hdmi port might be the modern equivilant.

https://youtu.be/ELANGsiaq5M

Went through and verified that a number of things were backing up and updating correctly. I feel a little less weight on my shoulders knowing things are working as they should.

I followed a similar path. When I was on Gnome I hated plasma. When Gnome 3 dropped I tried a bunch of stuff like Cinnamon, Budgie, Xfce, Lxde, etc. and settled on Plasma which has only continued to be great over the hears. I value the tweaks and the fact that it can be configured 100% desktop centric without a bunch of touch/convergence stuff getting in the way.

I appreciate their philosophy. I’ve been a Linux user since the early 2000s and have cycled through 30-40 distros at least. I’m not a highly technical user. I would consider myself a solid intermediate. For a daily use system I prefer arch, but my servers run Debian. Most of the people writing install guides for the software I deploy seem to use Debian so I run into less issues this way. It can be hard to follow a guide for Gentoo when you’re using Hanna Montana Linux, know what I’m saying? Same thing with Debian. It’s just a solid choice with the bonus of having a better, more ethical philosophy, and the benefit of being widely adopted and supported by people who can help when you get stuck. I don’t even mind gnome on my servers since it works well with a single screen and it’s super rare that I actually need the server GUI anyway.

Willingness to independently learn and the capacity to let the frustration roll off of you. You will occasionally want to bang your head against the wall, but give yourself the grace to learn.

You sound like someone who knows how to handle colossal levels of truck traffic.