I skim read the changelogs for breaking changes but mostly just YOLO it whenever I'm in the mood to update or a new monthly release drops.

That said, the VM that runs HAOS and the Z2M addon is snapshotted every night with two week's worth of retention, and I let HA do its own scheduled backups in case a snapshot restore doesn't work for whatever reason. So far I've never had a need for either but I rest easy knowing the options are there.

I lived in Australia for a few years and this baffled me for the longest time. I kept missing deliveries even though I was home, and it was only when I queried it with the local post office that they told me that the posties don't even bother carrying parcels around. They just leave them at the post office and card everyone as standard.

This isn't a Valve thing, its a USA thing

Good point. I was going to say that Valve could voluntarily offer a better warranty but isn't the standard in the US something like 90 days? Insanity.

Still, they could choose to match globally what they have to offer here, which is 2 years.

I'm sorry that you're getting less than sympathetic replies here. I don't know what the original was since you've edited the post and I don't have anything constructive to add as I assume you're in the US, but in the EU/UK goods have to last "a reasonable amount of time" regardless of the warranty term.

Some cheap plastic tat might reasonably be expected to last a few months, a washing machine maybe 10 years provided it's not misused. The further out you get from the warranty period, the more the onus is on the customer to prove it's a manufacturing defect, and the less you can expect in monetary compensation.

For a high value item like a computer, TV, or the Steam Deck no reasonable person would consider it a good run, shrug their shoulders, and rush out to buy a new one when it unceremoniously died 4 months outside of the warranty period. If that happened to me in the UK I'd be throwing the consumer rights book at them.

Sorry, I know none of that helps if you're not in the EU/UK, but contrary to what other are saying I don't think you're being unreasonable in complaining at all.

It's an 8 bay unit with six drives that are a mix of WD Red and Seagate Ironwolf, all NAS grade drives, basically. The other two slots have SSDs for hosting the aforementioned containers and VMs.

The largest drives I have are 4TB though, so maybe the larger capacity ones are louder? I also ran the fan profile in whatever the quietest setting is.

I am a tech oriented person, I work in IT, and a Syno ticks the boxes in many respects.

• Low power draw. Power efficiency is very important to me, especially for something that runs 24/7. I don't know how efficient self-build options are these days, but 10 years ago I couldn't get close to the efficiency of a good NAS.
• Set and forget. I maintain enough systems at work so I don't really want to spend all of my free time maintaining my own. A Syno "just works", it can run for months or years without a reboot (and when it does need one, it does it by itself overnight), and I can easily upgrade or swap a dead drive in a couple of minutes. When the entire NAS dies I can stick the drives in a new one and be up and running almost instantly.
• Size and noise. I don't have a massive house, so I need something that can sit on a shelf and be unobtrusive. In our last house it was literally sat in the living room, spinning drives constantly, and nobody was bothered by it.

The Syno I have is plenty good enough to run a bunch of Docker containers and a few VMs for all of my self hosted stuff, and it just does the job efficiently, quietly, and without complaining or needing constant maintenance.

I don't like this creep towards requiring branded drives and memory, though I'm pretty sure it's not legal in the EU. Regardless there are ways around it.

Right? I swear I see more brand new Teslas driving around my mid-sized town every day. Boils my piss.

I have that Beelink and while I don't run Home Assistant on it (I run that from a VM on my NAS) , it does run a whole bunch of stuff, including Plex, and it's more than capable.

I think you have a couple of options here:

1. Run HAOS on the bare metal and use Home Assistant addons to add the other functionality you want. Addons are HA managed Docker containers and there's lots of them out there, including Plex. What I don't know is whether you can access hardware acceleration this way, which you can do via regular Docker (see below).
2. Install something like Unraid, Proxmox or whatever flavour of Linux you prefer - literally anything that supports full blown VMs and Docker at the same time. Install HAOS in a VM and use Docker for everything else. Passthrough /dev/dri to any Docker containers that use hardware acceleration (Plex) and you're golden.

It's a great little box. Enjoy!

Or perhaps Privateer? I never played it but I think it was basically Elite in the Wing Commander universe.

Carrying anything other than a small folding knife without good reason is illegal in the UK, it's as simple as that. "It's for self defense" does not count as a good reason and will get you in deeper trouble as you're basically admitting to being willing to stab someone who "threatens" you.

If you own a domain, which you do, you can get wildcard certs from Let's Encrypt using a DNS challenge. Most (all?) popular reverse proxies can do this either natively or via an addon/module, you just need to use a supported DNS provider.

Everybody ITT talking about dashboards when the real killer feature is global variables within automations.

This is the tune that got me into both drum & bass and edm as a whole. Such a beautiful journey.

Had to scroll way too far to find this. For Karl!

Wolf's "tea" got me properly lolling. Nice one.

Libraries were simple enough, sure, but have you delved into the full settings? Trying to figure out the correct settings for QuickSync hardware acceleration was a mission in and of itself and there's very little guidance on what any of the options mean or do. I don't have the container running right now or I'd provide examples, but In Plex it's a single checkbox.

I'm sure Jellyfin will get there and it's a cool project, but it's fairly obvious that it's written by hobbyists, for hobbyists. Meanwhile Plex excels at just working straight out of the box.

Judging by the rest of the thread I'm going to get downvoted for this, but what the hell:

I'm sure I'll switch to Jellyfin eventually but I tried it out a few weeks ago to see what all the hype was about and it just... wasn't great. It was difficult to setup, with way too many overly-complicated settings, and then it refused to play one of the two test files I tried. Like it or not there's a reason that Plex is the dominant player in the game, and a large part of that reason is that it verges on plug-and-play for simplicity of both setup and use.

Yes, it sucks that they're removing remote streaming for free users, but I imagine there's a significant chunk of users who don't know or care how to properly open their server up to the world and are relying on the Plex proxies for their streams (which happens entirely in the background), and those aren't going to be cheap to run. Maybe putting them behind a paywall will provide the resources to make them faster.

I did buy a lifetime pass last time they announced a price hike; it's honestly paid for itself many times over, and I've been encouraging other users I know to do the same before this next one, because yes, it is a significant hike this time around. That said, while I wouldn't pay monthly for it, I do still feel like the lifetime pass is tremendous value for such a polished product. It's a shame they've had to do it at all, but I don't begrudge them for it.

I bought Mad Max because I originally played it when it was on Game Pass years ago and would like to do another run.

For the Deck specifically I got Art of Rally, Rogue Legacy 2, and Deep Rock Survivor. I've been playing a lot of Deep Rock Survivor.

Good shout. I've just recently moved from Pihole to Adguard Home myself, complete with Hagezi lists. I consider myself very tech savvy and I work in the field but AGH suits my needs much better.

One example is wildcard DNS to route all of my hosted services via reverse proxy. In Pihole I had to make weird blocking rules to make this work, but AGH has specific settings for it. It also supports DoH out of the box, whereas Pihole needs non-standard faffery to get it working.

Very pleased with AGH in general.

HACS installs community integrations whereas addons are like external programs that hook in HA. You can do the same thing with HA in Docker by installing the addon containers separately and then hooking them in manually but HA OS makes it much simpler.

For example I'm running the Mosquitto broker, Z2M, a Visual Studio Code server, diyhue, and Music Assistant as addons.

Docco page about it is here: https://www.home-assistant.io/addons/