Performance on opnsense is fine for anything you’ll be doing at home, so I wouldn’t factor that into your choice.

Features on opnsense are probably better, just due to all the packages you can install.

Do you prefer being 100% in a CLI all the time? If not I’d say opnsense, the GUI certainly makes things a lot easier when you’re not fully familiar with something and spending every day interacting with it.

For DNS? It’s an alternative for that, but not for the huge amount of other services Cloudflare provides.

Meshtastic (and Meshcore) use LoRa radios so require extra hardware, but as a result have much longer range than Bluetooth.

I could probably backup most of my important data to a flash drive but I’d rather not

You absolutely need to have working backups in place, otherwise your data is at risk.

I’m always curious about youtube music apps, it seems like there are so many of them everywhere, even f-droid has like 20+ clients listed that all look very similar.

Maybe just a fun app to try making so a lot of people do it?

Cryptomator + some cloud storage is the only thing that comes to mind that’s easy to use and cross-platform.

Either that or rclone + crypt, but that’s a bit more of a hassle.

It mimics discord, so functional voice rooms with screen sharing, text channels, and so on…

You don’t technically need to back up the PBS server as there’s not much there other than a basic config. As far as the backup data itself, you can mirror to another PBS server or I think it supports S3 for offsite storage.

A browser is one example, what’s the alternative to that other than sticking it inside some sandbox or something?

Not supporting a 3+ year old Intel wifi chipset out of the box is kind of wild though, that’s a super standard part.

I always thought that ublock origin in advanced mode was a suitable replacement? Maybe I’m off base with that.

Title is incorrect, it’s not Mullvad donating the money but one of the owners.

Any of them really, there should be very little difference between distros on the latest kernels.

The immich public proxy app is built for this, you run it on your isolated public VLAN, and it displays a shared album to people while loading the images from immich.

You can try and figure out what’s accessing the array:

fatrace | grep /mnt/mountpoint/

This will show you the process, type of access (read, write, open, etc), and path. If you don’t see anything right away just leave it running for a bit.

The SFF or MT form factors are a lot better, I’d say MT is the best as it has full height PCIe slots. Keep in mind the dell/hp/lenovo models all use proprietary motherboard form factors and power supplies, but not that big of a deal I think since there are so many parts available if something does break.

I highly recommend 7th gen intel or newer, as you get the much better quicksync support and quality.

If you get a desktop class CPU (i5-7500 for example), the whole computer will typically draw around 15W at idle with an SSD, which is pretty decent.

If you need less idle power draw then you’ll want a mobile/notebook class CPU (like an i3-7100u) as the idle usage should be less than 5W. But those typically only come in the micro/mini form factors.

Also good to remember that every 3.5" HDD draws around 7W when idle and spun-up (typically difficult to spin down on servers since there’s always some process accessing files).

Maybe run the public VPN at home with NAT enabled, and use it as the default gateway in the private VPN. Never done it but I think I’ve seen some guides on that concept.

TBH USB-C to 3.5mm adapters are better anyways IMO, they’re very small and just stay attached to my headphones, have a better DAC and amplifier inside than most onboard 3.5mm jacks ever did, and it never gets stuffed full of pocket lint which was always an issue on phones that had an onboard jack.

Is there any window in the room (or close by) where you could stick the vent outside when drying stuff?

I don’t see how it could condense the very hot damp air from the drier without an active refrigerant loop drawing a fair amount of power. It would also heat up the laundry room like crazy.