Mumble will do all of that except screen sharing. Only the server has to deal with NAT.

UHD bluray uses H.265. That’s one of the best codecs available right now. AV1 can do a bit better for certain content, but it’s not a huge difference. Basically nothing supports H.266 yet and AV2 is still in development.

Don’t rely on the VPN kill switch for torrenting. It’s not fast enough to prevent your IP from leaking if the VPN disconnects. The torrent client needs to be bound to the VPN interface. Transmission doesn’t have an option to do that, so you would have to run it in a container instead.

That worked when TV was analog and they were running megawatt transmitters. It doesn’t do so well with the low power digital stations unless you are close to the transmitters.

It weighs almost as much as my 14" laptop. They should split it into two pieces so you can mount the computer and battery to your belt.

Wow, grabbing a base64 obfuscated URL with curl sending the output to bash is a huge red flag. I guess Mac users must not know anything about the CLI.

Never pipe the output of curl or wget to bash. You can’t inspect whatever it downloads before it gets run. If the URL is obfuscated, there is basically a 100% chance that it’s malicious.

There’s Mumble for voice, text and images. The server is self hosted and there is no chat history so it’s private. It uses Opus so the audio quality is very good without using a lot of bandwidth. For gaming, it supports positional audio and a HUD that shows who is talking.

For the projects using Discord for support, they should move to a forum.

It’s also most certainly against the terms of service for your ISP, VPN or VPS, so you could get your service terminated.

Running something like this will put a big target on your back. I hope you have your network locked down tight.

I’ve been using their access points for a long time. They have been working quite well. I do have an old WiFi 5 AP that’s starting to fail, but that’s not too surprising considering the age.

I’ve just been running the controller with a local account. Hopefully they won’t try to force me into using a cloud account.

It’s USD $53 on DigiKey and Mouser. That’s still rather expensive for an old single board computer, but it has a lot more IO than most other computers as well as a pair of real time co-processors for handling high speed IO.

There’s always the BeagleBone Black if you need a lot of IO. It has a 12 bit ADC too.

You used to get a fairly significant upgrade ever few years for about the same cost as the old hardware. Transistors aren’t really getting much smaller anymore, so more performance needs a bigger die and costs more money.

The clock is only useful if the time is correct. They could at least put a small super capacitor in there to keep the time during short power outages.

I wish they didn’t even have clocks. The darn thing resets every time there’s a big gust of wind.

Gaming on Linux has been really good for the last several years. The main issue is certain multiplayer games that intentionally block Linux users.

Nobara and Bazzite are gaming focused distributions, but they are both based on Fedora. OpenSUSE Tumbleweed will give you the lastest kernel version if you want a rolling release distro.

Mint has a software manager and you can also install Synaptic.

Gaming on Mint works fine, but it’s based on Ubuntu LTS releases, so you won’t have the latest kernel or mesa versions. If you’re using an RX 9000 series GPU, you should probably pick a distro with a newer kernel and mesa version to get the best performance.

It’s good for basic things like cutting, merging and transitions. It can be used to blur something as long as it’s not moving.

That would be nice for CAD work, but it would have to be an actual PC monitor, not a TV. 42 inch would be just about right for my desk. The only ones I’ve seen are 32 inch, which is too small to replace four monitors.