Luke

Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be anything better than Calibre at the moment. (Though, I’m happy to be proven wrong!) Nothing against Calibre, it’s functionally amazing free software and it works very well; I said “unfortunately” because the interface is extremely dated and clunky and confusing to operate. Once you get it working, it’s very nice though. As long as you never have to go fiddling with it again, because every time you’ve gotta reacquaint with it’s weird UI. Still, it really is the best available at the moment, and it’s free so that’s awesome.

My favorite way to set it up is using the linuxserver image, which has a web-based VNC built into it, so you can remotely run the app on a headless server and then use your browser to interact with it.

I have Calibre configured to monitor a folder for new stuff I throw into it, where it’ll automatically fetch metadata and put it into the database. Calibre also has an OPDS server built in, to which I point a nicer frontend for reading comics. Currently that is Kavita which provides a decent web UI for both books and comics.

Anyhow, I believe you could enter data about your physical comics into the Calibre database, and then view the metadata with something like Kavita, though of course you’d be skipping the reading features.

I disagree, that’s an ideal time to exert labor leverage and make it more obvious to executive turds that workers have solidarity with each other.

I’m not sure what else they would need to do. You can just install Plex or Jellyfin on your Steamdeck right now, and you’ve got yourself an HTPC. It works great!

What are the missing pieces you’re still looking for?

Still want to add a few bits of info to it, but I’m pretty happy with the dashboard for my kitchen display that sits on top of the fridge where I can see it from the living room as well:

Uses the excellent LCARS theme by th3jesta via HACS.

Almost everything shown is just standard markdown cards, with minor tweaks by card-mod, with the exception of the 2 weather widgets shown (also via HACS):

• Hourly Weather Card
• Weather Chart Card

A foyer, essentially, but a lot smaller and almost strictly utilitarian. You take off and store your shoes, boots, jackets, etc there.

I usually interpret the phrase “drop in” to mean that the replacement being referenced will also work with everything written for the original. Does “drop in” in this case mean that Immich will transparently replace Google Photos, similar to how libretube replaces YouTube? That would be amazing!

Self hosting Gitlab or Gitea is always an option. Dead simple to do with docker (which the HA devs obviously are very comfortable using).

it really took away my ability to sell end to encryption to friends and family

As I understand it, SMS and MMS aren’t encrypted (and that’s why support was dropped). Unfortunately, you were never selling your friends e2e as long as they kept using SMS, even if they used it through Signal. In fact, it’s arguable that the false perception of security in “now I’m texting through Signal, and that means it’s secure!” was even more damaging than never having switched in the first place. (Unless they went all the way and stopped using SMS, of course.)

So, nothing is lost from that perspective. Now you can more accurately recommend ppl to use Signal messages instead of SMS and know that you are more accurately selling e2e with every convert because they can’t keep using insecure messaging through Signal.