MudMan

This is true, and I keep forgetting that’s the default to this day until I see it on someone else’s computer and I’m actually startled.

I was downloading a bunch of suspicious crap, but I also was… you know, not opening executables? I feel like you heard a lot about more sophisticated attacks back then, but most of the bad stuff was super obvious. But maybe my experience is not typical, I don’t know.

Did you guys get a lot of viruses in the 00s? I remember bumping into it more back in the good old disk days, where we got infected with skin-to-floppy contact, as the lord intended.

I feel like this conversation does a very good job of explaining why FOSS alternatives so often have terrible usability. “Not how most people would do it in a selfhost environment” is effectively “not how a tiny, teensy, borderline irrelevant proportion of users would do it”.

Selfhosting is moving towards being accessible to the average user in some areas. Not coincidentally, I suspect, mostly in areas where someone is trying to make money on the side (see Home Assistant increasingly trying to upsell you into their cloud subscription and branded hardware, for instance). This idea that structuring the software for the average phone user as opposed to the average home server admin is “bad” or “complicated” is baffling to me.

Oh, and for the record, no, that’s not the line for legality when it comes to watching the media I own. I am perfectly within my rights to access the files in my hard drive in any way I want. At least where I live. I make no promises for whatever dystopian crap is legal in the US. If anything there is a gray area on my using a specific type of drive to be able to rip commercial optical media that is theoretically DRMd in ways that my drive just happens to ignore. But remotely accessing my legal backups in my local storage? Nah, even if I was more worried about piracy than I am I’d feel fine on those grounds.

But also, copyright as currently designed is broken and not fit for purpose, and I suspect you don’t disagree and your pearl clutching here may have more to do with disliking Plex and not wanting to acknowledge an actually useful feature they provide than anything else. Maybe I’m reading too much into that.

I am very confused here. You seem to have slipped from arguing that it was difficult and complicated to arguing that it’s bad to be able to share content remotely because it’s a felony, which seems like a pretty big leap.

For one thing, it’s not illegal and I do rip my own media. I will access it from my phone or my laptop remotely whenever I want, thank you very much.

For another, and this has been my question all along, how is it possibly more difficult and complicated to have remote access ready to go than being “a DNS record away”? Most end users don’t even know what a DNS is.

And yes, not having (obvious) server configurations up front is transparent. That’s what I’m saying. It does mix at least two sources (their unavoidable, rather intrusive free streaming TV stuff and your library), but it doesn’t demand that you set it up. The entire idea is to not have to worry about whether it’s local content. Like I said, there are edge cases where that can lead to a subpar experience (mainly when it’s downsampling your stuff to route it the long way around without telling you), but from a UX perspective I do get prioritizing serving you the content over warning you of networking issues.

I don’t know, man, I’m not saying you shouldn’t prefer Jellyfin. I wouldn’t know, I never used it long enough to have a particularly strong opinion. I just don’t get this approach where having the thing NOT surface a bunch of technical stuff up front reads as “complicated and difficult”. I just get hung up on that.

Okay, but… how is it confusing from the front end if what you’re doing is going through the same steps of creating an account? You punch in a login and password in both.

Sure, Plex is doing this extra thing where it’s also bringing in centralized content along with your library and it will default to its remote access system if you log in from outside your network. But again, from the front-end that is transparent. You log in and you have your library. If anything they’re being a bit too transparent, I’ve had times where networking stuff got in the way and it took me a minute to notice that Plex was routing my library through their remote access system instead.

I can see objections to it working that way, you trade a (frankly super convenient) way to share content remotely and access content from outside your network without too much hassle for… well, going through someone else’s server and having their content sitting alongside yours. But “confusing and difficult” isn’t how I’d describe it. It seems to work like any other service, self-hosted or not, as far as the user-facing portions are concerned. I guess I just don’t see the confusing part there.

Wait, isn’t Jellyfin the same way? Pretty much every self-hosted app I run uses some web interface you log into so you can use it anywhere on the network. Sure, Plex also has some pre-set remote connection thing, but from the end user perspective it’s the same set of steps. I also had to make a login for all the stuff I fully self-host.

Is there no account management on Jellyfin? I would probably want that as a feature.

I barely even remember what the specific dealbreaker was, honestly. I was just dabbling, considering expanding my NAS and maybe getting the gear to dump my 4K BluRays. I gave Jellyfin a try first, I went through the setup process and I remember it being a) confusing to set up directly on my NAS, and b) very ugly.

I gave Plex a try to cover my bases and that looked better and got me up and running faster, so I just stuck with it. Easier remote access was a feature for me there, too, but the choice was made purely on the onboarding process, there was nothing activist to it. It’s maybe the most user-level, unresearched decision I’ve taken on software in a while, honestly. I was already trying to figuring out the ripping and encoding at the same time, so I didn’t want to put any additional attention on library management.

If anything I gave Jellyfin a bit more of a chance than I otherwise would have because I had heard a lot of angry chatter from people about Plex. I guess I came in after they made the changes that pissed people off and didn’t mind the state of the current product without a frame of reference. I would have bailed if there was a subscription, but they do have a one-and-done purchase, so now I’m set up, it’s working and I’ve paid them as much as I’m going to, so I’m fine with it. I do appreciate a free alternative existing, though.

Not the UI, the UX. The UI may be editable, but if I have to make my own UI to be happy with what it looks like or works like, then that’s bad UX.

I get that sometimes those terms are used interchangeably, but they’re not the same.

Hm. I gave Jellyfin a try and the UX was a turnoff, so I ended up in Plex. The separate management of metadata does sound like a pain to me, too, but maybe there’s a bit of sunk cost fallacy to that.

Either way it seems people are mostly fine with their choices and there is a viable free alternative, so… all good there.

Yeah, that’s the problem with “works well 98% of the time”. It’s fine for a random bug in a videogame where maybe you clip into the floor a bit. When it comes to important files, “losing your work 2% of the time” is what you call not being functional.

It is, which is insane, considering the lenghts to which MS goes to integrate OD right at the OS level.

Either way, as with all office software it’s not generally up to you which one to use and I end up using both. It’s just that OD has a much higher chance to randomly decide the project I’ve been working on for days has never existed.

I extremely don’t want to save on my computer, though.

The problem with OneDrive isn’t that it’s a cloud service. I willingly use cloud services and other forms of remote storage all the time.

The problem with OneDrive is it doesn’t work and MS’s response to that is to try to embed it into the OS, rather than fix it. I have paid good money to do what OneDrive is trying to do, just properly.

Water, in particular, feels like it tastes very weird through a straw. Maybe because it’s so neutral, but the mouthfeel of it changes so much with the vessel and straws just make it seem like someone is powerwashing your mouth to prep you for surgery or something.

It’s not the worst, and I bet the people in this thread reporting that they need straws for mobility or other medical reasons don’t think about it that much, but I think I’d default to flavored drinks if I had to use a straw by default.

Sure, but then you’re in the accessibility scenario. It’s still a utility thing.

That’s just soup at that point. And to be fair, a boba straw is in the spork continuum anyway.

I don’t… like them. Does anybody actively like them? Quick poll, does anybody here pop a can of coke or a glass of water and deliberately go find a straw to put in there?

As far as I can tell straws exist either to drink something too thick to reliably pour out of a glass rim, like a smoothie or a milkshake, or to cirvumvent some limitation, be it accessibility or having to extract liquid from a sealed vessel.

By the same token, who here just brings a large, wobbly paper glass up to their face in a dark movie theatre and tries to repeatedly sip it?

Oh, by all means, give that a try, see how it goes. I’d say “and then report back”, but… you know, that wouldn’t be much use.

I had to go look up if this was a tongue-in-cheek obscure reference to Frank Miller. It’s not, apparently.

Yeah, I guess that’s how mini PCs got popular in the first place. Just cram a laptop in a box, get most of the performance and less of the hassle. At a premium, of course, so I imagine on the manufacturing side it’s quite the win/win.

Still, a 10x multiplier in power consumption at idle and over 5x under load is pretty wild.