Dipped my toes into Linux maybe 10 years ago. It was awful and turned me off of it. Also the fact that I occasionally have to deal with some bespoke bullshit distro at work that does nothing that literally any tutorial I google says it will.

But I finally gave it another shot. Girlfriend got a smart TV. I got sick of ads. I had an old Intel nuc laying around that I bought for a dedicated DDR machine but it didn’t go great, so I stuck dietpi and pihole on it. Was still a mild clusterfuck and had dozens of open tabs trying to figure out what was breaking, but by 5am I had pihole configured and running, a plex server set up, and a desktop. Today I got the ftp server up so I can move stuff into plex without messing with flash drives. Still haven’t figured out desktop through ssh but that’s a later problem.

Bad news is youtube ads come from the same domain as the videos so pihole is useless there, but I’m still having fun and very excited about what I can do with a cheap piece of hardware I thought was useless. For the next project I’m thinking maybe trying to de-google my Google home minis and have a locally hosted assistant, but that would probably take a ton of research beforehand.

Suggestions, encouragement, and harassment welcome.

  • pimento64@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    101·
    3 days ago

    The lengths people will go to avoid using a HTPC with a wireless keyboard and mouse never fail to amaze me

    • Atropos@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      3 days ago

      I wish there was some kind of open source Roku style remote that worked with Linux. Don’t need a whole keyboard, just want pause, play, etc.

      • BCsven@lemmy.caEnglish
        3·
        3 days ago

        Kdeconnect paired between phone and device will give you a media touch pad for play, pause, skip etc. Once the media is started. You can also config connect bash commands on the device and run them via the phone.

        If I leave my PC and won’t be coming back I can hit the lock screen command, or sleep command. Etc

      • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
        3·
        3 days ago

        I mean, you can run an infrared remote. I don’t know if there’s specifically an open source infrared remote out there, but I wouldn’t be surprised, as they aren’t very complicated devices.

        On the software side, you’re going to want LIRC. It’ll have a list of supported receivers.

        https://www.lirc.org/

        kagis

        Here’s an open-source infrared remote:

        https://github.com/CoretechR/OMOTE

        Personally, I wouldn’t care if the remote is open source any more than I would my keyboard, but if it’s interesting to you…