You are aware that this isn’t a lifelong commitment, right? A Plex license doesn’t make using it mandatory. In fact, had you read a bit further, you’d have seen that it’s no commitment at all, and I’m still running and maintaining a Jellyfin server simultaneously, reverse proxy and all. Not just as a fallback, but also for the things it still does better.

I migrated my household use to Plex, though, because this evil “closed source for profit app” offers an on-device user experience that is as good, if not better, than that of a commercial streaming services. This makes the rest of the household use it happily, instead of seeing it as an inferior alternative.

Jellyfin’s user experience is simply not there yet, not even close. Its clients, if available at all for the system in question, are (mostly) functional, but certainly not fun.

I had the money to spend on the evil “closed source for profit app” and it made my family’s life a little better for it - are you sure that trying to shame me for that was the right reaction?

Plex killed their official plugin repository, but plugins are, technically, still supported. There just isn’t much life left in that ecosystem after Plex strangled it.

Ironically, it’s probably Jellyfin’s thriving plugin-ecosystem that’s holding back its clients - since anything with a native UI can’t really be used with any plugin that extends the UI feature set and vice versa.

Oh, and all “workarounds” that I know of for “offline” Plex involve essentially disabling user auth for certain IPs - which is insane. Plex simply doesn’t support local auth, it’s not an offline-capable solution. That (and some other restrictions) is why I’m still running and maintaining Jellyfin as a fallback.

Jellyfin requires a reverse proxy or similar to be reachable from outside the network, once that’s set up, the usability gap between the two becomes a lot smaller. And Jellyfin does, still, have some benefits over Plex - first and foremost: it doesn’t require an active Internet connection and an “ok” from a central server to fully function - it also has fewer restrictions when it comes to sharing content and a better plugin ecosystem.

Again, I think both are highly capable servers and I’m running both in parallel, even after migrating most of my personal use to Plex.

It’s the clients where it all falls down, sadly. Jellyfin’s are, even after all these years, clunky, ugly and unpleasant. The choice of supported devices and systems is also quite limited. This is where Plex shines: they have a, generally excellent, client for pretty much everything you would ever want to play your media on.

Do you mean hardware encoding, because that’s what’s paywalled in Plex.

I personally migrated from a Jellyfin ecosystem to a Plex with Lifetime Pass one when building my current server - while both are highly capable media servers, Plex has, by far, the better clients.

They’re pushing their proprietary “Metal” API, which is iOS and MacOS compatible. Just Apple being Apple.

MacOS is a good middle ground but not one I would personally use outside of a work machine.

I fail to see how it’s a “middle ground” between the drawbacks you mentioned before.

When it comes to gaming, Mac OS is the absolute bottom of the barrel, compatibility is utterly atrocious. With Apple’s insistence not to allow Vulkan drivers, they pulled the rug out of any leaps Mac OS could have made in that regard (like Linux did).

Apple also pulled the plug on any server capabilities Mac OS once had.

So, when it comes to gaming or server use, Mac OS would be my absolute last choice, not a middle ground.

Software choice is limited, but software quality is generally high and for some professions, the choice is flawless: when it comes to content creation, Apple’s ecosystem is hard to beat.

The Epson Eco-Tank printers are probably one of the most infuriatingly mislabeled products ever, though. They come with self-destruct timers.

If their software counter device that their excess ink sponge pad is full (which can happen rather quickly depending on printing behavior and the amount of cleaning cycles), they turn themselves into e-waste. Epson considers the sponge non-serviceable and the only official solution is to buy an entirely new printer with a clean sponge. Absolutely nothing Eco about that.

There are (paid!) counter reset hacks available now, though.

So, yeah, fuck Epson, but for very different reasons than op is listing.

Made good printers. They were one of the last bastions of sanity, but last year that one fell, too:

As far as I know, they finally pushed firmware updates to block 3rd party toner to most of their printers - which is pretty evil, given that most people purchased Brother devices exactly to avoid that kind of bullshit and nobody expected it from them.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131

That said, I love my Brother DCP-9022CDW. It has been an indestructible workhorse, eats any toner I want and lets me reset the counter and keep printing another 2000 pages on an “empty” toner. Heck, I’ve had third party toner that I could reset three times before actually running out. That latest firmware update will stay far away from it, though.

Frankly, I want X to lose big time.

That’s weird, doesn’t it usually take seven?

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/thering/images/1/1e/Samara_Morgan.v1.webp/revision/latest?cb=20221030003832

Unraid 6.12 and higher has full support for ZFS pools. You can even use ZFS in the Unraid Array itself - allowing you to use many, but not all, of ZFS extended features. Self healing isn’t one of those features, though, it would be incompatible with Unraid’s parity approach to data integrity.

I just changed my cache pool from BTRFS to ZFS with Raid 1 and encryption, it was a breeze.

I generally recommend TrueNAS for projects where speed and security are more important than anything else and Unraid where (hard- and software-)flexibility, power efficiency, ease of use and a very extensive and healthy ecosystem are more pressing concerns.

Unraid is also awesome for places with high energy cost: Unlike with your typical RAID / standard NAS, it allows you to spin down all drives that aren’t in active use at a relatively minor write speed performance penalty.

That’s pretty ideal for your typical Plex-server where most data is static.

I built a 10HDD + 2SSD Unraid Server that idles at well below 30W and I could have even lowered that further had I been more selective about certain hardware. In a medium to high energy cost country, Unraid’s license cost is compensated by energy savings within a year or two.

Mixing & matching older drives means even more savings.

Simple array extension, single or dual parity, powerful cache pool tools and easily the best plugin and docker app store make it just such a cool tool.

My wife teaches at a university. The title is partly bullshit:

For most teachers it couldn’t be more obvious who used ChatGPT in an assignment and who didn’t.

The problem, in most instances, isn’t the “figuring out” part, but the “reasonably proving” part.

And that’s the most frustrating part: you know an assignment was AI-written, there are no tools to prove it and the university gives its staff virtually no guidance or assistance on the subject matter, so you’re almost powerless.

Plex supports native auto deletion, just like you are asking for. For Jellyfin there’s a plug-in: https://github.com/terrelsa13/MUMC

Plus for some odd reason the layout on my shieldTV is an absolute disaster for some reason

That’s because Jellyfin’s clients are still mostly terrible. Jellyfin is the more flexible media server, Plex has the far, far better clients.