Yeah, I tried pure Arch first, fucked up by not installing the right drivers for my old Nvidia card, and was never able to really get it running properly. So I gave up and tried CachyOS instead, on the basis that it’d probably get the drivers right for me. And it did.

Debian for everything I need to not fall over, CachyOS for computers I want to fiddle with.

You’ve posted this right as I’m about to begin setting up an OpenWrt router. Thanks!

This is the result of dmidecode

root@OpenWrt:~# dmidecode -t slot
# dmidecode 3.5
Getting SMBIOS data from sysfs.
SMBIOS 3.1.1 present.

Handle 0x0026, DMI type 9, 17 bytes
System Slot Information
       Designation: SLOT1_M.2
       Type: x4 M.2 Socket 3
       Current Usage: Available
       Length: Long
       Characteristics:
               3.3 V is provided
               PME signal is supported
       Bus Address: 0000:ff:1f.7

Handle 0x0027, DMI type 9, 17 bytes
System Slot Information
       Designation: SLOT2_M.2
       Type: x1 M.2 Socket 1-SD
       Current Usage: In Use
       Length: Short
       Characteristics:
               3.3 V is provided
               PME signal is supported
       Bus Address: 0000:ff:00.0

As far as I can tell, the top one is the M.2 in question, so it’s a 4 channel PCIe slot. Running -t connector doesn’t show that slot at all, presumably because it’s not got anything connected to it currently.

I’ve order a cheap(ish) adapter that should arrive today, so I’ll bung it in and report back.

This is the output of dmidecode

Handle 0x0026, DMI type 9, 17 bytes System Slot Information Designation: SLOT1_M.2 Type: x4 M.2 Socket 3 Current Usage: Available Length: Long Characteristics: 3.3 V is provided PME signal is supported Bus Address: 0000:ff:1f.7

Handle 0x0027, DMI type 9, 17 bytes System Slot Information Designation: SLOT2_M.2 Type: x1 M.2 Socket 1-SD Current Usage: In Use Length: Short Characteristics: 3.3 V is provided PME signal is supported Bus Address: 0000:ff:00.0

I’m guessing the top one is the M.2 in question, on account of it saying “Available”. And from what I understand having searched for some of the info on that, it should work, assuming the firmware allows for it.

So the currently unused slot won’t work with an ethernet adapter? It’s purely for storage?

I started with Mint, then dipped into KDE Neon and Kubuntu, and these days I rock Debian on my server because I want absolutely nothing to fall over if possible. And that’s how it’s been for me. I SSH into it every couple of weeks to run updates, and that’s about it.

Debian is great. Boring, and great.

This puts me in mind of the smart playlists I built in iTunes. Several playlists of 3/4/5* tunes, plus a few other rules to bring lesser played tunes to the surface. These all fed in to one bigger 50 track playlist that would pick something like 30% of its tracks from 5*, 25% from 4*, 20% from 3*, then make up the rest with the other stuff. Oh, and it would filter out any track that wasn’t 5* that had been played in the last two weeks.

Then, when I was rocking my iPod, if I was digging something that wasn’t rated, I could spin up a rating and it’d get shifted to the corresponding list ready to drop into the pool for future enjoyment.

It was properly great.

I guess you can still do it with Apple Music, but it’s not as much fun when your library is thousands of songs you added and never listened to again.

Anyway, I’m going to see if I can recreate it with Navidrome. I’ve got 14k tracks in there and a willingness to listen to them all.

Just be aware that if you want anyone else to connect to your Jellyfin, you’ll still have to route it through a domain and reverse proxy, unless you’re comfortable letting them log in to your tailnet.

It’s a bit of a fiddle to set up, but once it’s done it’s quite satisfying.

I use Navidrome, and have set up Lidarr to feed it if I’m feeling a little hook-handed, if you get my meaning. Lidarr was a bit of a bollocks to set up, but once it’s running it’s pretty neat. I access it via Tailscale so can add stuff to the library wherever I am.

As for accessing it: again, I use Tailscale to run it through a reverse proxy on my website, so I connect to it using a subdomain. But as long as I’ve got Tailscale active on my phone, I could always access it that way. As others have suggested, I use Symfonium on my phone, and I use Feishin on everything else.

It all works pretty well, to the point that I don’t really use Apple Music anymore.

I used to have a Mac mini at work with two displays. I kept Thunderbird in one virtual space on the left and would switch to it as I needed. Moving to Kubuntu, it drove me mad that I had to move both desktops to get to my email.

It was extra ironic, because where macOS treats both desktops as the same in terms of the Dock and wallpaper, Plasma actually treats all desktops as spaces that require separate settings. So the panel on one screen can look completely different to another. So they’re separate in a way that makes no sense to me, but not separate in a way that also makes no sense to me.

But ultimately it doesn’t really matter, and I’ve been able to work with it just fine.

As someone who came to Linux/Plasma from macOS, the way Plasma has dealt with virtual desktops has always baffled me. So I’m glad to see that it now works much more like the way I’m used to. Bravo!

Thinking on it, I suppose the biggest cost is in terms of my time.

Up until this point, I’ve put quite a bit of time into learning how things work, and how to deploy things I’d find useful, and that can replace paid for services. Even now things are set up and running, I still have a tendency to fiddle with things. I’ve spent far more time on my Navidrome server than I ever did on Apple Music, put it that way. The same amount of time listening, mind.

Technically, £0

I do have use Mullvad VPN, but not really for any of my hosting, and I do have a Hetzner VPS for my own site, which I have started using to access things. But I can access it all with Tailscale, which is free, as long as I can remember port numbers.

But with those taken into account;

Mullvad: £5 VPS: £15 Domain registration: £35pa

So all told it’s about £22 a month.

I do need to look into donating to some of the services I use the most though.

Electricity $200 Off-site backup $130 FOSS project donations $800 Thigh-high socks $3600 Domains £150

someone who is good at the economy please help me budget this. my family is dying

Oh aye, he’s a monumental prick.

It’s a crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy dashboard.

I use Soulseek to the exclusion of any other music acquisition services. Between it and Lidarr my Navidrome server is GLORIOUS these days.

Yeah, I figured as much. I do have Nextcloud on my server, and probably should get around to shifting most of what’s in my SyncThing over to it.

I’ve used SyncThing for over a year from Graphene to, well, any computer I have. But I’ve never been able to work out: is it possible to set ST so that it doesn’t take up space on a device, like how cloud storage platforms do?