Depends on what your usecase is for what is “essential.”

I think keeping household documents, taxes, medical bills, etc… In a local only paperless-ngx instance is quite essential to the organization of a household where everything is searchable and able to be organized on multiple levels compared to a simple document folder on 1 computer.

Having a document or self-hosted wiki with an in - case - of - death document that gets backed up in an encrypted, but accessible by family place is probably the most “essential” thing.

Actually, the AI assistant fad isn’t all bad.

HomeAssistant has an open souce assistant pipeline that integrates into the most flexible smart home software around. It is completely local and doesn’t rely on the cloud at all. Essentially it could make Alexa’s and google homes (that literally spy on you and send key phrases back to your built data collection profile) obsolete. That is a way not to have to rely on corporate bullshit privacy invasion to have a good smart home.

Indeed transcribing and translating (and preserving dying languages and being able to re-teach them) are 2 of the best consumer uses for AI. Then there is accelerating disease and climate research.

If these were the use cases that were pushed instead of fucking conversational assistants, replacements for customer support that only direct to existing incomplete docs, taking away artists’ jobs, and creating 1984 “you can’t trust your own eyes and ears” in real time, then AI would actually be very worthwhile.

What?

He is saying that AI uses countries worth of energy by itself. Even a normal search query using AI uses orders of magnitude more energy than a traditional search query.

Literally tech companies have been buying or reserving entire power plants exclusively for training AI datasets. At least Microsoft reactivated an old nuclear plant instead of buying out coal plant energy shares.

And 90% of uses for AI are absolute dogshit corporate fluff or a shiny activity for 10 year olds to play with for 30 minutes.

There are legitimate uses like auto note taking, voice assistants, etc… But it is destroying the environment because corporations are shoving it into every possible thing they can, quadrupling the energy growth rate and straining our electrical grids and burning tons and tons more coal to do it.

Here in Belgium there used to be big government subsidies for solar panels 5-10 ago.

Now the same wattage battery + solar setup without any government subsidies is a good chunk cheaper than that time with the large subsidies.

Pretty cool and shows the power of government renewables subsidies. A huge percentage of houses in Belgium have solar panels now.(and electricity still costs 0.30€/kWh average because of fossil fuel energy lobbies)

Now that there is a local industry around it, most renovations and almost all new builds include them.

won’t work, this is their own hosted gitlab instance lol

This is a good way to do it.

I went one smaller with the Node 304 which only can do 4 HDDs with a GPU inserted. Going used for consumer desktop CPU is the most powerful play for the money I think.

This is a good path forward OP for a pretty powerful server

• Node 804
• Used AM4 motherboard ( microatx B550) (can be around 150€)
• used 5700X or similar (seen as low as 100€)
• new 500W power supply
• 32GB DDR4 3200 ram in 16GB sticks
• WD red plus 10TB helium filled for balance of noise and performance and price. My 10TB drives are as quiet as my 4TB. My scheme is ZFS mirror of 4TB (2 drives) for important docs, and 10TB drives for non critical data. Drives are by far the most expensive unless you get good second hand drives
• if you want to do Jellyfin media server, pick up an arc A310

The problem is that the exceptions can actually be dangerous

In the professional space:

Add Altium, KNX, pspice, LTSpice (luckily works in wine), and for us electronics/electric guys lol.

Linux is a 3rd class citizen in ANSYS simulation tools. Slow updates, old UI, etc… On Linux. Pretty much only used as a simulation node for kicking on sims from windows.

Pretty much all architecture software

Many ERP systems desktop apps

Not to mention a lot of companies use active directory for access control + sharepoint

Web apps suck, but have been very helpful in Linux compatibility in the enterprise space since the devs only have to care about 1 set of production builds.

At my work, software guys and mechatronics PLC focused guys get away with Ubuntu (saleae is great), but for electronics and mechanicals it is not even worth it to dual boot.

New year 2026? 😉

You said it right there in your comment.

Sleep mode, (and other effectively off modes) where it is functionally useless, it can do.

MSP430 can do 140uA/MHz. That is ~7 times the power that this application supplies, and that is not counting any single other chip quiescent current or chip that actively provides useful data. You would have to have a battery anyway or a big cap to provide the needed current for on-states. Or you could run it extremely low frequencies like you said, but those tend to not scale linearly at all with per MHz power ratings. Quiescent currents tend to catch up fast at that scale. I would be extremely doubtful that 150kHz would scale perfectly and wouldn’t have already exponentially decayed to around its lowest possible on-state consumption for the chip. I would definitely have to see tests on that.

The smallest of batteries like the VARTA tiny cells in TWS’s are infinitely more useful and practical and it would take this application months to fill a single cell, discounting all losses.

It is the Mac of network hardware in my corporate - entered experience.

It is aesthetic hardware, marketing, and everything software related looks polished on the surface, but is buggy (particularly their access which is the worst thing to be buggy) with the least possible configurability, completely obscured debugging resources, and proprietary ways to make you reliant on their support services.

That being said, I am still using them because I got a 30€ UAP-AC-SHD from my company’s old stock when we switched to Cisco hardware. And their cloud gateway ultra is a good value. My whole house setup with prosumer hardware will be 140€ and where my internet comes in is the worst place in the house to put a wireless router.

I don’t think people realize how extremely little 50uW is.

For a standard 3.3V microcontroller assuming a 95% efficient voltage regulator will be a current of 14.4uA. Just having the HSI master clock enabled on one of the low power STML0 chips is 15uA. This will literally only the clock. That is 0 sensors, 0 communication, 0 IO, nothing useful at all. For reference, reading SPO2 with a very efficient maxm86161 takes 10uA by itself in ultra low power mode with low accuracy and not counting the max leakage current of 1uA. For full operation, you need about 1000x-10000x that amount for short bursts.

“Oh but it can cHaRgE tHe BaTtErY”

Let’s say the device has a standard 100mAh battery (apple watch had a 228mAh or more). At 100% efficiency with absolutely not one millijoule being used by any other electronics (which would never ever happen, it would at the very least need a boost converter), it would take around 277 days to charge up that tiny tiny battery.

Let’s take another example of an even smaller battery. To charge one side of the airpods 3rd gen (0.133Wh battery), it would take 110 days per ear

This is one of those free “energy harvesting” fad BS based in nothing but wishing and marketing. It is an interesting learning project for wireless antenna beginners, but that is the extent.

While true, in order to get Linux mobile more mainstream, you have to have great google compatibility just because of the sheer volume of people that have to use google calendar for sync with family and friends and/or have gmail as a primary email. That’s just a shitty fact of life. Baby steps.

However, indeed you are completely right that at the current time there are probably a very low amount of people wanting to use it right now that are completely reliant on google.

~/workspace/git

That way I can also keep other stuff in the same “workspace” directory and keep everything else clean

I have a Code, simulations, ECAD, and FreeCAD folder in the workspace folder where projects or 1-offs are stored and when I want to bring them to git, I copy them over, play around in the project folders again, then copy changes over when I am ready to commit.

I could better use branching and checking out in git, but large mechanical assemblies work badly on git.

KDE for my main PC. Pretty with floating panels, KDE Connect, QT apps are often the best apps in their class and are perfectly integrated (FreeCAD, krita, okular, kdenlive, vlc, dolphin, etc…) And konsole is also very full featured.

I don’t know what KiCAD uses, but it also seems very well integrated into the KDE desktop unlike most gnome apps.

XFCE on MX Linux for an old Intel Compute Stick to keep it very usable.

“Critical” as in not really needed.

It is very bugged and constantly runs even if it isn’t doing anything. It will also max out your disk IO for hours at a time with an HDD for larger game storage.

I have had it off for 1.5 years across 3 OS installs and have never had a problem with stuttering or shader related problems in that time. It is really not needed anymore for 95% of games since the Linux async solutions were merged.

Maybe if one uses severely out of date kernels it is critical

This seems like classic corporate backtracking when their customers spot a terrible, deliberate decision.

That being said, I am happy about it. I got my company to use it and finally got my girlfriend to use it and just recommended it to her brother. Would hate to have to try to find something else

Really? My girlfriend’s A52 doesn’t have this feature. That is part of why I bought my Xperia 5ii. Is it a new feature?

(After 3 years the battery is at 70% on mine because apparently Sony uses shitty as hell batteries and software drain glitches, while my girlfriend’s A52 always charging to 100% lasts a day and a half with 3x the use, would not recommend)

That is a different usecase though. That is simply syncing local musical with a server.

I do that too because i have an SD card. Just use Syncthing for that. Much faster and less hassle. You can use any music player on your phone that you want, not just one that works with jellyfin.

If you aren’t streaming music in real time for the majority of time, then do a phone sync, not a streaming server.

I have heard symphonium is very good if they are looking at closed source Plex anyway. It works with jellyfin and navidrome.

I just use syncthing to sync all of my music to my phone’s SD card. Then PowerAmp since there aren’t many fully featured foss music players. I am keeping my eye on Auxio though, keeping it installed and updated.