• Daeraxa@lemmy.ml
      49·
      11 months ago

      This is the problem, making the fork known to the userbase of the original software. When the Atom text editor was killed by Microsoft we decided to fork it as Pulsar but it was an uphill struggle to really get the word out. We got a massive boost when the youtuber Distrotube featured us in an episode and again with an itsfoss article but we still routinely find people who have been using Atom without knowing we even exist.

      • lad@programming.dev
        15·
        11 months ago

        You found some more by commenting about it now.

        But if the fork is on GitHub there are some ways to search for the most maintained forks, albeit not with the GitHub tools which is unfortunate

        • Hexarei@programming.dev
          5·
          11 months ago

          There’s always the fork network graph, but it’s not exactly easy to spot which forks are good, just the ones with the most recent commits

          • lad@programming.dev
            2·
            11 months ago

            Yeah, it’s just that I have recently tried to find an active fork, ao experienced this

        • flatlined@lemmy.dbzer0.com
          1·
          11 months ago

          What tools would you recommend to fund good forks. I’ve had a Firefox extension or two but they’ve either creased working or weren’t fantastic to begin with. Currently just using the network graph, limitations and all.

        • theneverfox@pawb.socialEnglish
          1·
          11 months ago

          I never used atom, but I could use a new sidearm next to vs code (my plugin list is getting a bit ridiculous)

          Is it (or rather proton) worth checking out?

  • dan@upvote.au
    74·
    11 months ago

    Keep in mind that software doesn’t have an expiry date. If a piece of software is unmaintained and doesn’t have an active fork but it still fulfills your use case and doesn’t have any major issues, there’s no need to replace it. Some of the software I use hasn’t seen any updates in five years but I still use it because it still works.

    Edit: As an example, a lot of people still use WinDirStat even though the latest release 1.1.2 is now 17 years old.

    • lad@programming.dev
      48·
      11 months ago

      I’d say that problems mostly come from the need to update dependencies in case of vulnerabilities being discovered. But not every software needs elevated privileges or can become a vector of attack, I guess

      • baseless_discourse@mander.xyz
        9·
        11 months ago

        If a software is compromised to allow remote code execution, then the situation is pretty dire even without elevated privileges.

        Basically your entire userspace will be compromised, and in terms of personal computing that is pretty much all you can lose.

    • tetris11@lemmy.ml
      371·
      11 months ago

      Desktop - Linux - Yes, likely. If not, here’s a flatpak
      Desktop - Windows - Maybe it still runs in a compatibility mode?
      Desktop - iMac - Here’s an emulator, good luck.

      Mobile - PostMarketOS - Yes, likely. If not, here’s a flatpak
      Mobile - Android - Maybe? Try it and see if you get permission denial
      Mobile - iPhone - Fuck you, no.

      • dan@upvote.au
        27·
        11 months ago

        Windows is pretty good with backwards compatibility, probably the best out of anything. I can run Visual Basic apps I wrote in the early 2000s on Windows 11 and they still run fine. Some old 32-bit games work fine too. You can even run some 16-bit Windows 3.0 apps on 32-bit Windows 10 if you manually install NTVDM through the Windows features (it was never ported to 64-bit though)

        Linux is okay for backcompat but I’m not sure an app I compiled 20 years ago would still run today.

        • tetris11@lemmy.ml
          21·
          11 months ago

          Tell that to video games, which constantly need a compat mode enabled

          • dan@upvote.au
            11·
            11 months ago

            The fact that a compat mode exists means that Microsoft put effort into backwards compatibility. Windows even emulates some old bugs for old popular apps that depended on them. I don’t think any other OS does that.

            • toastal@lemmy.ml
              3·
              11 months ago

              I don’t like Microsoft Windows at all, but you are absolutely right about doing a good job with backwards compatibility.

              Linux isn’t so backwards compatible, but with much of it having open source code, you can often compile it again yourself—tho having been written in a language that offers good backwards compatibility also helps.

      • jcg@halubilo.social
        3·
        11 months ago

        I use windirstat almost monthly and have never heard of WizTree. Keeping this in mind for next time I use it.

        Though at this point, maybe I should just commit honestly

      • dan@upvote.au
        41·
        11 months ago

        It is. I was just using WinDirStat as an example of an old app that people still use. The 1.1.2 release from 2005 is still downloaded 60,000 times per week according to the stats on the Sourceforge download page.

    • TxzK@lemmy.zipOP
      18·
      11 months ago

      Yeah Fogejo is amazing. Moved all my personal projects from GitLab to Codeberg recently. Wish I knew about it sooner

    • Pyro@lemmy.worldEnglish
      184·
      11 months ago

      I want to like Forgejo but the name is really terrible.

      Is it “forj-joe”? Nah, that double-J sound is way too awkward.
      Do you then merge the J sounds to make “forjo”? If so, why not just call it that?
      Is it maybe “for-geh-joe”? That seems the most likely to me, but then that ignores the “build < forge” marketing on their website.

      I know it’s pretty inconsequential, but it feels weird using a tool that you don’t even know how to pronounce the name of.

      • Deckweiss@lemmy.world
        202·
        11 months ago

        afaik it got bought by some company and people fear that there will be anti-user changes like with all the other open source projects that were bought by a company in recent years.

        • lastweakness@lemmy.world
          11·
          11 months ago

          No company has bought gitea. They just made a commercial entity which can accept contracts for enterprise installations and make some hyper specific customisations not needed for normal users (like some specific mode of internal authentication) in those installations. So far Gitea has been great still.

          • Neshura@bookwormstory.socialEnglish
            2·
            11 months ago

            They did start a cloud service for hosting Gitea which introduces a direct incentive for them to make Gitea less hosting friendly by, for example, making newly added configuration options less comfortable to set up. And more recently some changes to code contributions that are not exactly community friendly (as a result forgejo will be unable to upstream some of their changes)

            What lead to Forgejo, as far as I am aware, was less a problem that is already there and more the set of problems that have a very high chance of eventually manifesting, at which point forking the project would be too late.

      • Gamma@beehaw.orgEnglish
        121·
        11 months ago

        They got bought so people jumped ship, I haven’t heard anything bad personally

        • QuazarOmega@lemy.lol
          5·
          11 months ago

          Yes as you say, I think they’re still pretty fine, though I do prefer Codeberg as a hosted solution myself and in turn Forgejo, especially for their federation plans

              • Gamma@beehaw.orgEnglish
                3·
                11 months ago

                Looking at the forgejo issue, the dev working on the federation tools for gitea had worked for 6 months (gitea issue opened Jan 2022) before opening the issue Nov 2022 with the initial goal being to merge into forgejo and then merge that upstream with gitea

      • dukk@programming.dev
        15·
        11 months ago

        They’re both pretty on par for the most part. If it’s too much of a hassle, there’s no real need to switch.

        Now that Gitea is owned by a for-profit company, people are afraid that they’ll be making anti-user changes. This, Forgejo was born. It pulls from Gitea weekly, so it’s not missing anything. It’s also got some of its own features on top, but they’re currently pretty minor. Also, most of the features end up getting backported back to Gitea, so they’re mostly on par with each other. However, many features find themselves in Forgejo first, as they don’t have the copyright assignment for code that Gitea does. Additionally, security vulnerabilities tend to get fixed faster on Forgejo. They are working on federation plans, however, so we’ll see how that pans out.

        Overall, there’s no downside of switching to Forgejo, and you’ll probably be protected if Gitea Ltd. makes some stupid decisions in the future. However, at the moment, there’s no immediate advantage to switching, so you can stick with Gitea if you’d like.

        • PlexSheep@feddit.de
          1·
          11 months ago

          I thought gitea was doing federation too? Im pretty excited about that part, as I’ve wanted to move away from GitHub but the visibility it gives is just on another level. Users can’t register on my instance, therefore they also can’t open issues and PRs.

          Is switching to forgejo more work than just changing my compose file a little? I hope my database can get transferred.

          • Neshura@bookwormstory.socialEnglish
            2·
            11 months ago

            The developer working on federation plans to merge the changes into forgejo first and then from there into gitea but I’m not sure in how far the recent changes to gitea’s CLA have affected those plans.

            Forgejo is a drop in replacement (they are committed to keeping it that way for as long as possible) so, as far as I know, simply changing the gitea image to the forgejo image is all you would need to do.

        • pingveno@lemmy.mlEnglish
          14·
          11 months ago

          Sun Microsystems bought Star Division, the original creators of StarOffice, which was proprietary. Sun open sourced OpenOffice, with StarOffice still available with proprietary add-ons. When Oracle bought up Sun, they first reduced resources to OpenOffice and then shut it down altogether when LibreOffice came along, with trademarks and such assigned to the Apache project.

      • deus@lemmy.world
        23·
        11 months ago

        The original OpenOffice is no longer in development. LibreOffice is an active fork of that.

  • umbrella@lemmy.ml
    411·
    11 months ago

    yo but tbh this gets old.

    i just want my stuff to update without me having to find out a year later its unmantained and had a fork all along.

    or having to watch the repositories of stuff i use for signs it might be unmantained. i didnt know half the (popular!) stuff mentioned here was abandoned then forked.

    libforknotifier when (or even how)?

    • irotsoma@lemmy.worldEnglish
      22·
      11 months ago

      Yeah, it would be nice if it was easier for devs to just turn over the project to an “official” fork. Unfortunately, I’m sure that would get abused by scammers taking over projects forcefully and adding in malware before anyone notices.

      • 9point6@lemmy.world
        11·
        11 months ago

        You’re spot on with the latter, I’ve come across a few projects over the years where the ownership is transferred and it’s then loaded up with malware or even just instantly abandoned again because the new owner just wants it on their GitHub to get a job or something.

        • Gestrid@lemmy.caEnglish
          11·
          11 months ago

          I’ve come across a few projects over the years where the ownership is transferred and it’s then loaded up with malware

          See: The Great Suspender

          The original developer sold the repo to a new, anonymous maintainer. The new maintainer abandoned the repo but continued updating the Chrome Web Store version of the addon. That version eventually got delisted by Google for including malware.

      • lud@lemm.ee
        3·
        11 months ago

        I am pretty sure you can transfer ownership of a repo on GitHub.

    • lemmyingly@lemm.ee
      4·
      11 months ago

      I’ve kept away from some projects because it’s just a single dev doing 99.9% of the contributions.

  • toastal@lemmy.ml
    352·
    11 months ago

    Even better when someone forked it away from proprietary, closed-source, publicly-traded, for-profit, US-based, account-required, training-AI-on-your-code-then-selling-it-back-to-you Microsoft GitHub forge/social media network often with vendor lock-in to some other forge without all that BS.

    • Auzy@beehaw.org
      3·
      11 months ago

      There’s no lock-in whatsoever on Github… And it’s free for open source projects…

      And no account is required unless you’re submitting code…

      The only valid thing here is the Github AI training honestly, but there is no reason to believe they can’t scan code from other repo’s.

      Also, its only a matter of time until Microsoft gets sued for it

      • toastal@lemmy.ml
        1·
        11 months ago

        only a matter of time until Microsoft gets sued

        https://githubcopilotlitigation.com/ it’s been ongoing

        no account is required unless you’re submitting code

        it’s free

        Submitting issues & discussions require an account. Using the search for code requires an account. On Lemmy this week there was also a post about viewing “Discussions” & “Wiki” being A/B tested or whatever with an account required to view. Which is to say, if submitting patches, issues, & or using some features requires giving up personal info & agreeing to Microsoft’s ToS to create an account, you have locked out users & their freedom isn’t respected if their autonomy to not create an account with a company known for predatory behavior cannot be respected.

        lock-in

        Users locked out sucks, but so does lock in. Sure you can set a non Microsoft GitHub remote & push to it, but I’m talking about the forge on whole rather than the tool that backs it. The more Microsoft GitHub features you rely on, the more the existance of a ./.github directory’s or otherwise gets cited as being too hard to move. As more features get locked behind authentication, so will the APIs that allow some ability to migrate. GitHub were the popularizers of the “pull request” model too which is severely limiting but is the only way you can operate on their site (no stacked diffs, mailing patchsets, etc.) which eliminates alternating review methods (while you could use a third-party, due to MS GitHub’s ingrained workflow to too many, I’ve seen alternatives being considered as “too hard” rather than “different” (even if could be “better”)). I’ve also witnessed some communities like Elm freeload on the “free” hosting & require all community packages be upload to only MS GitHub or you can’t publish & by proxy participate in the community (or in their case even refer to other remotes, VCSs, tarballs for packages (even private ones) but that is due to Elm having a terrible default package manager).

        They’ve embraced a Git forge; they’ve extended the space with Codespaces, Sponsors, Actions, Copilot, even VS Code proliferation far beyond pre-acquisition GitHub; now we just await the extinguish part.

        • jkrtn@lemmy.ml
          1·
          11 months ago

          How can I learn more about alternatives to pull requests and other tools or processes for code review?

        • Auzy@beehaw.org
          11·
          11 months ago

          I was the only one in that thread who actually tested that post last week, and i couldn’t replicate it. Nobody tested it, and there wasn’t even a screenshot or repo which was tested. There was 0 evidence. People only suggested A/B testing only after I tested it, because they were likely too lazy to test (and rather than ask OP for their testing methodology, instead just assumed they were right). Nobody mentioned it in any projects either, and they WOULD have. I suspect OP was wrong (and there was a partial outage that day), which could have affected those services.

          The search for code DOES NOT MATTER! You can still download the code… Not a big deal. The tipoff should be, that nobody hosted by Github is actually publicly complaining about it on their project lol

          I actually STRONGLY agree with that lawsuit though

          Just because Microsoft made improvements to the service, doesn’t mean they plan to extinguish anything. It doesn’t always happen (VS Code is a good example… Totally open source, multiplatform, and MIT licenced)

          • toastal@lemmy.ml
            3·
            11 months ago

            But you’re willing to gloss over all methods of contribution (unless the project owner explicitly provided alternatives) require accounts to a proprietary service owned by Microsoft, not owned by your project? Or they way the Microsoft GitHub way is entrenched in the larger community via education & peer pressure to join the social media network.

            I don’t see Microsoft with both its history & its shareholder obligations to maximize profit to do anything but try to extinguish—corporations always aim to monopolize.

            • Auzy@beehaw.org
              2·
              11 months ago

              I don’t think you realise how easy migration from Github is lol… Ask the Jira guys if you want an example of moving ISSUES. And Github easily has the most comprehensive API out of any service which makes migration VERY easy.

              I know you think you’re helping Open source, but you’re doing the opposite here.

              1. One of my projects failed in part because we were screwing around with infrastructure too much. Github is EXTREMELY comprehensive
              2. Github is extremely UNRESTRICTIVE from the API side, especially considered to more “friendly” ones like SourceForge. VERY easy to migrate from to other 3rd party services. I’ve come across open options which don’t really have any good means of migration
              3. It sounds great “oh set up your own server, etc”… Woo pro open source. It’s NOT. We did that once too. Wastes money, and wastes resources unless you’re a large organisation
              4. If Microsoft is “that bad”, you should be making forks for their MIT projects (like VS Code). You’re not…
              5. It makes us all look bad when people try to present Assumptions as facts, because every developer sees through them. There’s a reason no projects are actually protesting here…
              6. On one hand you’re arguing Microsoft can’t add any services because thats bad. On another hand, if they remove them, you’ll argue something different. They can’t win
              7. It’s literally NORMAL for any large developer project to need to authenticate your information with a login for lots of things. Firefox, Fedora, etc. Personally, if I’m contributing stack dumps, I don’t want my stack dumps accessible by everyone…
              8. Contributor agreements on these projects are also incredibly common in case you weren’t aware…
              9. You’re taking what you read from the other post as Gospal. You haven’t even tested that posts claims (or you have and couldn’t prove them)

              Just so you know, one of my projects was actually mentioned in LinuxWorld Magazine 20 years ago and mentioned at the front of Slashdot, and I’ve used everything from self-hosted, Gitlab to Github over the years (CVS, SVN, Mercurial, tried the Ubuntu one but forget the name and Git now).

              I think you’ve forgotten what open source is actually about… It’s about developing code, not managing infrastructure… And you’re conveniently glossing over how easy it is to migrate data from Github (its definitely not trapped there).

              Instead of screaming “Microsoft Sucks” and nitpicking, you should be asking developers why they aren’t moving. That’s what helps open source developers

              • toastal@lemmy.mlEnglish
                2·
                11 months ago

                Everything you point to as ‘pros’ for Microsoft GitHub could be applied to GitLab, SourceHut, Codeberg, GNU Savannah, Notabug, Radicle, darcs hub, Smedeeree, Pijul Nest as far as hosting infrastructure where you don’t have to–and with the exception of GitLab being open core & a publicly-traded company, they are open source & not ran by corporations (some as for-profits, but indie, others, as foundations, others as community run). You’re conflating my (and many of our) distaste of capitalism/corporatism by rejecting Microsoft as if it means anti-access or anti-open source/anti-ethical source. Microsoft is 100% an enemy playing the long-con by vacuuming up all these developer adjacent services as megacorporations try to do (see their expanding portfolio of: WSL, Azure, GitHub, Codespaces, Sponsors, Copilot, VS Code, npm, Teams). I also believe it’s only a matter of time til they pull the plug on their APIs like Twitter & Reddit as the board of shareholders demand preventing migration (just like the “Search” is disabled).

                There is also no shame in self-hosting these things & you can start hosting most DVCS with SSH + an HTTP server in front of the code even if it doesn’t have some web GUI to browse files so it doesn’t have to be that complicated. NixOS modules or similar can get you a cgit, GitLab Community, SourceHut, etc. all running without too much effort (services.cgit.enable = true), or forming a local collective & sharing resources is cool too & doesn’t need to be each project self-hosting. You can still have ‘barriers’ like authentication if you need that require agreeing to your community’s terms of service instead of Microsoft’s ToS–which is the system used by KDE, GNOME, & many other big FOSS self-hosted GitLab forges.

                I’m also not against rejecting some of the tenets of “open source”–with OSI as its definitional gatekeeper–in favor of the copyfarleft, copy fair, Commons Clause, etc. that require corporations contribute code or finances as I don’t think it’s a difficult argument to say our current systems extract values from the Commons more than adding putting folks in positions of not getting to work on their valuable library that everyone relies on, but doesn’t want to help finance its maintenance (see Babel)… in which case, rejecting the corporations in favor of the Commons could be a greater goal than “open source is actually about”.

  • Bob@feddit.nl
    311·
    11 months ago

    “PIN number”

    vs.

    “FOSS software”

    Who’d win in a fight?

      • Ookami38@sh.itjust.works
        61·
        11 months ago

        Why not your personal identification PIN number? Gotta be specific. Your personal PIN number is just the one you like, but it identifies nothing. Same with the identification PIN number. It identifies something but not sure what. And a personal identification PIN, well, it identifies someone, and uses a number somewhere.

    • MystikIncarnate@lemmy.caEnglish
      61·
      11 months ago

      Oh man, I want to use a longer pin for my card so badly.

      From what I understand, the banks mostly support it, the problem is that not all point of sale does. Those terminals are frequently cobbled together with some pretty garbage software and if it’s hard-coded to four digits, whelp, good luck. I hope tap is working… Or NFC or something because otherwise, you’re SOL.

      • JasonDJ@lemmy.zip
        4·
        11 months ago

        Try it out. You may find out that your bank supports much longer pins, but only uses the first four digits anyway.

        • MystikIncarnate@lemmy.caEnglish
          4·
          11 months ago

          Truncation is not a good look.

          For being an institution that is supposed to be trusted to hold all your money, their security has me scratching my head most of the time.

    • HardNut@lemmy.world
      6·
      11 months ago

      I keep hearing this, but my emby server has been running strong for a few years now without issue. My only gripe with it is the emby premiere ads that take up a lot of home screen space, but I got rid of it with custom CSS that you can put in emby settings, doesn’t even show up on the phone app anymore.

      I’ve heard Jellyfin implemented features that emby puts behind a paywall too, but I’m not sure what. Care to fill me in on what I’m missing?

      • CaptDust@sh.itjust.works
        121·
        11 months ago

        I’ve no experience with Emby but the fact you’re talking about ad workarounds and paywalls and subscriptions leads me to believe you owe yourself to at least try out jellyfin. It has none of that.

        • HardNut@lemmy.world
          1·
          11 months ago

          I feel like your interpretation of my comment is really off. I’ve never had issues with paywalls, and the reason I said the ad thing was my only gripe was because I thought I didn’t have to explicitly say it wasn’t a big deal. I haven’t had any problems that make me feel like I owe it to myself to find something better, because my Emby experience has been great.

          The point of my comment is that I’m curious what I’m missing out on, since people’s problems with Emby don’t really line up with my experience.

          • CaptDust@sh.itjust.works
            3·
            11 months ago

            I was admittedly being a bit of a smartass, I don’t actually think jellyfin is doing anything particularly special.

            It’s free, it’s open source, it doesn’t try to upsell me or show me ads, it’s fast, it has personalized user accounts, it organizes and presents media beautifully and plays it flawlessly on whatever device I choose to use. For me, idk what more I could ask for from a media server.

            EDIT: looking at Emby premier, seems $ provides hardware transcoding, native apps, downloading media for offline, cover arts, database backup, I guess this is stuff I take for granted. Jellyfin just includes it. If jellyfin couldn’t do transcoding or native app playback OOTB I don’t think I’d use it.

            Edit2: for context I moved from kodi to jellyfin just a couple years ago, I wasn’t aware of it’s FOSS-fork relationship to Emby before now.

            • HardNut@lemmy.world
              1·
              11 months ago

              The weird thing is I get cover art and hardware transcoding with Emby but I’ve never paid. I know it has it because 4k playback was lagging until I enabled it 🤷‍♂️ and it would be weird to imagine emby without cover art of any kind. Doesn’t every media app just scrape by title? Is this referring to something else?

              I also use the native emby app on my phone, I think my smart TV has it too, unpaid. Man, I’m really confused about their paid features lol everything I think would be needed seems to be in native Emby as well. So weird.

              Good to know though, I could see downloading for offline use being very useful for travel and stuff.

    • AtariDump@lemmy.world
      22·
      11 months ago

      Does Jellyfin have:

      Music filtering/smart playlists?
      Sonic analysis?
      Good 4k/x265 performance?
      A third party (or built in) utility that shows me streaming usage per person?
      Allows me to limit remote users to streaming from a single IP address at a time?
      Let’s me watch something together with another remote user?
      Has an app for most any device (like Plex or Emby) that does NOT require sideloading?
      Has built in native DVR steaming/recording support?
      Two factor authentication?
      Doesn’t default new clients to 720p for remote streaming?

      When it does, I’ll switch.

    • MystikIncarnate@lemmy.caEnglish
      7·
      11 months ago

      I actually paid for synergy because I was using it extensively back in the day (probably about 10 years ago? Maybe less? IDK. Long enough that I don’t care to remember when); and after an update I realized the windows service portion had a bad memory leak. I don’t reboot my PC very often, so I kept getting memory errors despite having more memory than the average (I believe it was 24G at the time, when 8G was considered “good” instead of it being the bare minimum that it is now)… I couldn’t even always fix it by restarting the service, since it was some kind of memory mapped file or something that was causing the problem, so it didn’t register normally that the process was consuming the space. The only way to fully resolve the problem was to disable the service (or remove the software) and restart. So I abandoned synergy for a long time because I wasn’t sure when they would actually recognize the problem and fix it.

      I got a notice late last year that synergy had updated and my license was going to be given a free upgrade so I could use the newer version at no extra cost, so I figured it would be a good time to try it again, and I had a situation come up in December (ish) where I actually wanted to see if I could get it working; I couldn’t. Now that I’m running exclusively multi monitor setups, synergy’s configuration doesn’t actually give you the option of setting where your screens are connected individually or anything, it just shows each PC as a single display, and for the life of me, not only could I not get it right, but I couldn’t even find the trigger point that would move my mouse and keyboard controls to the other system. Even if I managed to get them over there, I had no idea how, and I had no idea how to get back.

      So I disconnected it entirely and I’m back at square one. I bought a multimonitor KVM to fix another problem and it reduced or eliminated my need to use synergy… But I still want synergy to work (or something like it). Is barrier more robust?

        • MystikIncarnate@lemmy.caEnglish
          1·
          11 months ago

          Does this only work for Windows?

          I was hoping for something cross platform. Since synergy sucks and will probably continue to suck for a while, I’d like to find something in the interim, or to replace it entirely so I can control a Linux system from my windows PC, or something like that.

          Don’t get me wrong, this is great for Windows, but I originally got synergy because I was using a Linux system as a media player, so I could mouse over and change tracks or load a playlist or whatever I wanted to do without having to reach across the room for another keyboard or something like that.

          I haven’t used that set up in a while, though I might switch back to it with a raspberry Pi or something eventually, and just have a small micro system playing media using chromium to load up YouTube music (or whatever). The old set up was the Linux system using xmmp (I believe) to play music from a NAS. The output went through a physical mixer, so I had immediate access to turn up, or down, the music from my media system, without dedicating resources to music on my main (gaming) system. This was back in the days of Windows XP and I wanted to squeeze every last FPS I could from my main system, so I offloaded my music to another system; which was some old P4 that I had lying around. The HDD was questionable so I never put anything on it that I couldn’t lose, hence all the music was on my network storage.

          At the same time I was using the network storage system (I call it a NAS, but it was really a Windows box with some file shares) to do other offloading tasks, like downloading Linux ISOs from torrent files.

          I did a lot to ensure my system would not get bogged down. I have servers now for any file shares and torrent stuff, but I’ve never solved the media system problem. Using a pi or similar SBC and piping the audio through the mixer I still have connected to my main computer is still appealing to me… Among other things… And just putting up a display for it next to my monitors and roaming my mouse and keyboard to it to pick what I want to watch/listen to, still seems like a good idea to me.

          I don’t want to get restricted to Windows to do it though, since then I would need a much more power-hungry system to run it. I’ve concerned myself a lot more with efficiency since I was younger, considering that I’m paying for my own power now. Historically, I would be paying for it through rent that includes utilities. I own a house now and pay all my own utilities. So a sub 10W pi sounds good. Most windows systems, even very lightweight systems usually need at least double that.