NC is fine. Ignore the haters.

Why the hell would the FUTO guide recommend OpenVPN? It’s a nightmare. I guess they also recommend pfSense instead of OPNsense so there’s that.

For your own sanity, learn about Wireguard.

News to me and I have Fedora on a dozen varied computers. Never missed a step.

Happy to help.

The docker setup is probably less maintenance than a straight install, but your usecase might need the bare install. there’s also Home Assistant that can add Piper as an Addon (which is a docker container inside the HassOS docker container). Also the Hass install will let you add faster-Whisper and Openwakeword for a full voice assistant that autoconnects via the Wyoming protocol.

I used Arch for a couple years on servers. It was a pain in the ass with constant updates and breaking changes.

Most server applications aren’t looking for the latest updates and aren’t ready for them. Security updates alone don’t generally break applications.

I can’t imagine a hosted provider of any size wanting this sort of thing.

At the gettin’ place.

Piper just moved to https://github.com/OHF-Voice/piper1-gpl

It’s fine, and it’s probably the best TTS you’re going to run locally.

Rebuilding containers is trivial if they supply the dockerfile. Then the base image is up to date, and you can add any updates/patches for things like the recent react vuln.

Home Assistant

Wow, there’s an uphill battle right there…

Someone linked this fork, seems maintained:

https://github.com/nicholas-fedor/watchtower

Watchtower, the automatic container image update platform notorious for breaking things

That’s kind of a bullshit allegation. Watchtower did what it did, if you set it up to grab unstable tags, then too bad for you.

idk about a 4b these days but the 5’s are stupid priced. You can get a refurbed 6th gen intel machine with 16gb of ram and an SSD for the price of a 4Gb Pi 5. Add an ESP32 running ESPhome or Firmata and you’ve got everything you could do with a Pi and a lot more.

Do their radios still not do 801.11af? You still need to have their stupid POE injectors hanging on the wall?

I can’t say I particularly trust even Bitwarden’s servers. I export Bitwarden passwords to a spreadsheet once a month and rsync it along with SSH keys to a USB key. Takes a couple minutes.

Oh come on, Gnome 45 was only 2 years ago. I guess we’ll see how extensions go then, but I’m not holding my breath. I wouldn’t waste my time on building anything for Gnome at this point. I abandoned Gnome at the garbage-collector BS where they blamed extension devs for the memory leak then used the big hammer solution.

In the meantime:

Mar 2024: https://felipec.wordpress.com/2024/03/18/stupid-gnome-developers/

May 2025: https://medium.com/@fulalas/gnome-the-insanity-never-ends-f84a77ec3e13

uninformed

I’ve used Gnome on and off for about a quarter century. There have been devs with very popular extensions that have sworn off Gnome because of their attitude towards breaking extensions. So if they’ve suddenly become concerned about breaking things people rely on to make Gnome marginally usable after Gnome itself has removed popular features, then that’s a recent trend. So pull the other one.

This is Gnome we’re talking about here, they don’t GAF if extensions work or not. They’ll break them tomorrow if they feel like it.

IDK how Frigate handles alerts, but Blue Iris will write an alert to MQTT topic if it matches object recog, and I have an app MQTT Alert that watches that and goes nuts if it comes up. The BI android app is underwhelming in its alerts.

I’d have to figure Frigate has some sort of MQTT capability. I tried using Frigate but it was pretty basic for my needs, so I moved on.

Landfill.

There’s a reason even GrapheneOS is looking to build their own phones. You pretty much need a published device tree and that’s becoming rarer than hen’s teeth in current phones. Even Pixel’s are starting to get locked down.