I’ll throw in SWAG as another option which I found was easiest to setup, albeit it on a VPN/local only setup. It supports certbot for SSL and pre-defined proxy configs for various services (mostly linuxserver.io containers but there are others) and it’s easy to edit them to make your own configs. I’m not sure about portainer support as I’m not familiar with that.

Xiaomi phones usually still have IR blasters at least.

It’s the power usage and physical space that puts me off those kind of solutions. Of course, that varies a lot based on your living circumstances (location, whether you own a house, etc).

Decent enough midrange devices and good custom rom support, but missing the features that some of their competitors have (headphone jack, SD slot, etc) although I get that is becoming increasingly niche unfortunately.

I believe some use tailscale for this, although I don’t entirely like having a third party store wireguard keys if I’m understanding it correctly.

It’s a nice improvement on Kobo e-ink readers in particular, with much better usage of space and lots of options for tweakers.

Annoying side note: I’m getting like 5 notifications from comment replies on Firefox desktop, I think it might be one for every tab. Think I’ll disable that for now.

I’m doing it with openwrt x86, since I need SQM + wireguard (and at least the former still isn’t supported on *sense last time I checked). Works fine in all honesty, and I can reboot the VM much faster than real hardware.

No koreader support yet which is a deal breaker for me, but I’ll keep an eye on it for sure.

It could be some pipewire weirdness on the client, I’m not sure. I’ll probably also try using pipewire or pulse on the host and use their built in named pipe support. Maybe that will work better.

Aliexpress has some reasonably affordable fanless mini PCs. Not quite as low power but you can run a heap of containers on them since they are more powerful and x86 and some of them have multiple ethernet ports which can be useful for router purposes etc

Bandcamp are also one of the few that sell lossless FLAC files, and while I don’t really care about listening to FLAC directly, it makes sense as an archive format.

Personally I use Snapcast as an endpoint, plain MPD for local files, and navidrome for remote access to my library.

That’s where I’ve been heading too. The snapcast client has been a bit unreliable for me on my desktop though (choppy and stuttering) but it’s great in its unix-like flexibility and I’m sure it will continue to get better.

Honestly, I hope that mobile connections in my country are one day: fast enough, cheap enough, and reliable enough that I could just use snapcast remotely and get truly seamless self-hosted streaming but that’s still a long way away I suspect.