This program is a client for the very solid Tvheadend TV streaming server. Tvheadend supports pretty much any source you can think of, but is a little more complicated to setup.

Tvheadend is a selfhosted service meant to be run on your own server with your own TV dongles / IPTV channels / etc.

If you only want to watch TV on your PC, doing so with something like Kodi is probably a better idea, as Kodi also supports USB tuners and is simpler to setup (doesn’t require a separate server).

I was pretty neutral towards Ubuntu, up until an automatic system update removed my deb Firefox and replaced it with the snap version, even though I specifically set the apt repo to a higher priority.

The entire reason I left Windows is because I don’t want (for example) Edge shoved down my throat after every update, and yet Ubuntu has gone and done the exact same thing with snaps.

After literal hours of fighting, the only solution I found was to fully disable automatic updates. With Pop OS I have all the benefits of Ubuntu, but I also get a company (System76) that does cool stuff and doesn’t try shoving snaps down my throat.

I really like Pop!_OS, AFAIK it doesn’t have any telemetry. It’s basically a Ubuntu fork but without the stupid Ubuntu stuff, and they’re currently even working on their own Desktop Environment.

You can absolutely re-encode h265 video, but you can’t do it losslessly. In the end, it’s always a balance between quality and filesize.

I decided for myself, that 1080p30 crf28 h265 is good enough for home video, which lead to a 50% to 80% storage space reduction on videos from my phone.

If you don’t obsess over quality, I would highly recommend just messing around with ffmpeg a little bit and decide how much quality you’re willing to lose in order to save disk space. When you’re happy with your settings, you can either use ffmpeg itself or some fancy batch program like Tdarr to transcode all (or parts of) your video library.

My goto command is:
for file in *.mp4; do ffmpeg -i "$file" -movflags use_metadata_tags -map_metadata 0 -vcodec libx265 -crf 28 -vf scale=1920:-1 -r 30 "${file%.*}_transcoded.mp4"; done

Magic Earth (while not FOSS, it’s privacy oriented though) can do this.

There’s also Transportr, but AFAIK it’s been unmaintained for quite a while now, so it may not work / stop working soon.

Adding to what others here have already said, I’d definitely download Signal and see if you can get any people to move from WhatsApp/Telegram/whatever to Signal.

I don’t know much about iOS apps, but you could look into more privacy focused YouTube clients, and possibly 2FA clients too (although that’s a bit of a controversial topic on iOS AFAIK).

I saw you mention in another comment that you use Amazon Alexa for smart home appliances. Depending on interest in selfhosting / time / motivation to move away from Amazon, you could look into using Home Assistant instead. It even has a Lemmy community: !homeassistant@lemmy.world.

Yep my mistake, I confused ShadowSocks with Cloak.

No clue how that guy is zooming with one finger, but zooming while recording a video on my Pixel 6 works just fine when pinching with 2 fingers.

I’ve never used a Pro Pixel (so can’t comment on telephoto), but I never noticed it if there is one. From just clicking around between ultrawide and 1x on my Pixel 6, it seems fine and if I had to guess I’d say it roughly takes 0.5s to switch.

Indeed, they all use UFS 3.1 (so does the 128 GB Galaxy S23 though). I have never looked at storage type and my Pixel 6 doesn’t feel slow in any way.

I have no idea what you mean with the camera, it is one of the best Android cameras out there. This is also true when running Graphene OS, as long as you download the ‘Pixel Camera’ app from either the Google Play store or APK sites (must download as an APK bundle then!).

AFAIK you nailed the differences between NewPipe and NewPipeX.

As for FairEmail, I’ve used it for well over a year without paying and it’s been great (I plan on buying the pro version soon). It has kind of a pay what you want model, technically you can unlock all features for literally 10 cents.

I’m not that knowledgeable on security for hosting services with external access either, I’m sure there are some great YouTube videos out there.
A Raspberry Pi should be perfectly fine for hosting something like Seafile or Nextcloud though (Nextcloud might be a pain in the butt to host).

DP altmode means being able to output HDMI over your phone’s USB-C port, the Pixels are famous for missing that feature. But I believe from Pixel 8 onwards it was added again, if this is important for you you should do your own research on it though.

I’m afraid your best bet here will be using WhatsApp.

Edit:
FindMy (for Android) might also be usable for that, but honestly if you just want it to work I’d still vouch for WhatsApp.

Signal supports a single momentary position, but not live location.

Here’s what I use:

• YouTube:
  • LibreTube has really nice UI/UX and integrates SponsorBlock and DeArrow. It relies on Piped for fetching subscriptions (since the newest version it will play just fine with a broken Piped server though).
  • NewPipeX is what I use when LibreTube doesn’t work and for downloading YouTube content. It is a fork of NewPipe which integrates SponsorBlock.
• Mail:
  • I use posteo.de as a provider, but it isn’t fully liked here due to it not supporting custom domains.
  • mailbox.org is another solid provider (with support for custom domains AFAIK) if you don’t want to use Proton for E-Mail.
  • FairEmail is my mobile client of choice (Geary or Thunderbird are good for Desktop).
  • k9 Mail is an equally good choice.
• Cloud Storage:
  • For Cloud Storage I prefer the selfhosted Seafile.
  • If you just want to share files temporarily, Wormhole is a good tool for that.
• Gallery App:
  • Aves Libre is solid if you don’t want to selfhost, but it doesn’t have fancy features like automatically (od manually) detecting faces.
  • Immich is pretty much the selfhosted Gallery app.
• Video Player:
  • Just (Video) Player is what I use, but honestly the stock player should be fine.
  • VLC will play pretty much anything you throw at it, but I don’t like its UI that much.
• Music Player:
  • Vanilla Music is alright, but nothing special. Musicolet, while not FOSS, is a privacy respecting Music Player that has a bunch of handy features, most notable one for me is the ability to have multiple queues.
• 2FA App:
  • Aegis has never let me down, although you should keep in mind it doesn’t have any sort of cloud sync.

For password manager and weather I use the same apps as you.

I run a Pixel with GrapheneOS. I actually also came from Samsung, and for me there are quite a few creature comforts missing that I didn’t even think about (eg. Samsung Dex, DP altmode, I really like the One UI Dialer, Miracast, Brightness Slider in notifications, switching recents and back button, headphone jack, SD card slot, …).

As for the Pixel being worth it, I’m ok with it as I was due for an upgrade anyway (Galaxy S10 -> Pixel 6). I’d recommend, if you value your privacy and are fine with losing some Samsung features, to either go all the way and upgrade to a new Pixel when your S23 gets old / dies or buy a cheap used Pixel (Pixel 6 and 7 currently has pretty decent value) to just test it out.

i use miracast where I can (my TV and Samsung phone support it natively), as it pretty much just works and is a decent protocol. Sadly every phone manufacturer that isn’t Samsung seems to have abandoned it right now, but it is still widely supported in TVs. On Linux, there is the app gnome-network-displays (yes it also works on KDE) to cast your screen over miracast.

Miracast is an actual local streaming protocol (closely related to WiFi Direct). For content streaming the only FOSS standard I am aware of is FCast, but sofar it only is implemented in the GrayJay Android app.

Edit: There is also Deskreen for casting a PC screen.

For casting mobile to PC there is also scrcpy.

This isn’t really casting, but I often find that an HDMI cable (often paired with a USB-C to HDMI dongle) is the simplest and most reliable way to display a phone screen on another monitor (as long as the phone supports DP altmode).

What worked for me at my old school was using a ShadowSocks proxy. Basically what this does, is it takes all your traffic and just makes it look like random https traffic (AFAIK). ShadowSocks is just a proxy. The description fits the Cloak module, mentioned below.

I believe multiple VPNs support this, for me with PIA VPN it’s in the settings under the name “Multi-Hop” (PIA only supports this on the Desktop App, not on mobile).

This technique is pretty much impossible to block, unless you ban every single VPN ShadowSocks Proxy IP. If that is the case for you (chances are practically 0), you could also selfhost ShadowSocks in combination with the Cloak module, however this method is a lot more complicated.

What’s the issue with PIA? I’ve used it for quite a while and am quite happy with it.

The choice that surprised me was them recommending 1Password ($40/year) over Bitwarden ($10/year, solid free plan).

If the main battery isn’t “meant to be replaced”, it will often act as the CMOS battery (e.g. MacBooks have been doing this since roughly 2008).

Push Notifications don’t really exist for Lemmy yet, as they aren’t supported in the backend currently:

https://github.com/aeharding/voyager/issues/1027 https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2631

As someone else here said, your best bet is probably monitoring your Inbox RSS feed.

+1 on OnlyOffice, it has 1:1 formatting compatibility with Microsoft Office. Unlike LibreOffice, it doesn’t have to translate documents between odt and docx in the background.

In the same vein, OnlyOffice has poor compatibility with odt files etc.