Before HomeAssistant, OpenHab was the undisputed king. I still like them because they let you remotely access you home without having to subscribe to anything or set up any remote access methods

Redmine is the top self-hosted alternative to Jira

I set up Debian as my NAS and gaming tower. Drives are paired by capacity in RAID, it uses BTRFS, they are pooled together, and have one LUKS password that unlocks them with the main OS drive.

With Samba share, some podman containers, Tailscale, it does everything I need it to. Since I also use it as a desktop computer, I don’t really have dashboards since I already typically sit in front of it, or can remote desktop in. I occasionally check the health of the drives, and use ECC memory/motherboard

Tailscale is not American, it’s Canadian 🍁

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You can connect Ollama and cloud providers like ChatGPT into OVOS/Neon, so that when you ask questions it doesn’t know how to handle, it can respond using the LLM.

OVOS/Neon

Consider PikaOS if you like to game, which is based on Debian and provides an easy way to pick you desktop environment. Bazzite may shut down if Fedora gets rid of 32-bit libraries as planned https://wiki.pika-os.com/en/home

Debian with KDE.

Debian because it is (one of) the most established distro(s), stable releases, most distros are based off of it for a reason, you’re not forced to deal with Snap packages (I recommend Flatpak via Flathub, but Appimages and .Deb files are common options too).

KDE gives you that Windows look (other popular one is GNOME if you prefer the MacOS look). It’s the desktop environment people often confuse with as the distro, so don’t go necessarily by how it looks as you can easily change that.

When I was considering what to run, I found LineageOS TV provided the best experience for being able to get all the other TV apps, and even Jackbox Games. Many TV apps offer some content free with ads, which can be taken care of. Android TV interface only shows Android TV apps in the main app drawer though.

I loved Debian with KDE Big Screen on the pi for the customizability. You can run scripts like fetching tv schedules right on it (or you can just do this on your jellyfin server), and generally you have more customizability. I run PWAs as well via Firefox. I found Steam Link difficult to get working unless on Buster or earlier.

For remote, I tried out all the ones on Amazon, and found USB connection to be most reliable, and there’s one that has a keyboard on the reverse, and an option to do voice control from the remote that’s a major 🔑

I find having the full OS is useful, and this KDE environment proves great https://plasma-bigscreen.org/

OVOS & Neon are MyCroft’s successor. They work well, and can even plug into LLMs