I'm on the new HTPC version installed as a snap. I can see that it's meant to work with passthrough, but I find that it... doesn't.

I haven't tried in a few versions. Maybe I should give it another crack.

I used MythTV for decades. I really loved the "raw" digital output of the music player. It would casually hop from 44/16/2.0 to 96/24/5.1 between songs and my amp would decode it. I even contributed a small patch to make the visualizer work with 24bit audio.

The live TV hardware accelerated deinterlacing was really good too. TV recording was super reliable.

The TVDb lookup was a tad glitchy. It turns out that it didn't include the year in the lookup. I wrote a patch that did it (and improved my metadata lookups heaps) but never made a PR.

I jumped to Plex around 2020. Mostly for things like streaming to my phone so I can have my music on the train. I believe Myth was better for HTPC, but Plex isn't too far off.

I'm not a fan of Plex audio. Every time I try to make it do AC3 passthrough or skip the OS mixers, the whole thing breaks.

Because it's from 8 years ago and it never happened.

They want to play video games. They are typically not productive people.

Printers are always horrible to administer. Brother are typically the best on Linux. I wrote a massive instructional blog a few weeks ago because it took so much work to get my HL-3150CDN working over USB. I had to repackage a Frankenstein's monster of a driver because my printer never got 64-bit CUPS filters.

Even if they do get the VBR encoding perfect, you'll still get people on bad connections that will only have a buffer underrun when a dude shows up in a sparkly suit.

Mine was pretty good. Strangely I had FTTC for about 2 weeks and they came back to upgrade to FTTP.

I did a lot of the prep work myself to make sure it was as quick and easy for them as possible. I dug trenches, pulled drawstring through the walls etc.

The weird part was that they got 90% through the FTTP install and the job got cancelled because I already had NBN. I had to convince them it was worth finishing.

Vortex is written in .Net, so, yeah.

You've just said your 5 biggest problems with Linux are things that Microsoft did.

What's the lesson here? Clean your bongs?

Imagine facing 30 years for not emptying out an old coffee cup.

That's like, a million people's wages. Absurd.

The longest outage I've had in a decade is when my primary SSD died a 2 months ago and I had to reinstall using config backups. It was down for around a day.

I've thrown a UPS on it and flown overseas for a week or two. It's basically just email for me and the kids.

I've had longer outages on hosted services, TBH.

I host my own mail. When it's down, the mail just gets delivered after I get online again. Almost all mail servers are configured to retry over a period of several days before giving up.

Once my health insurer sent me mail by post to tell me that my mail server was down. That was kinda funny.

TightVNC. Use TightVNC.

My company has build scripts that practically pull half an OS from an update mirror every time someone commits a code change.

It's maddening how inefficient CI/CD setups are.

But it's a badass fucking fractal!

The train ride home just kills it. I eat. I clean. I sleep.

Yes, this is dog.

I don't follow closely. I try not to follow at all.

I have two Surface Pros that are BIOS locked so I can't install Linux. They also don't support Win11.

I'm not sure what I can do with them.