As someone who threw in the towel on a Hackintosh and decided to experiment with Linux One More Time, please allow me to offer my thoughts and experiences:
I chose Elementary OS to experiment with for its "ease of use" and simple install. I do have to hand it to them on the latter--where I've struggled for literally days trying to get this home built i5, carefully chosen for compatibility to boot as a Hackintosh, with the Elementary installer all I had to do was boot from the USB (which happened automatically) and chose to install the OS. It found all the hardware, installed quickly, and booted
fast.
But.
You know there's a but, right?
The Sharing settings panel
doesn't have a FILE sharing option. Turns out EOS doesn't have file sharing installed. Makes it tricky to move multiple gigs of movies over to start using it as a Plex box!
Speaking of... Plex installed more or less easily, but if I wasn't technical already, I don't think I would have gotten it done. Turns out EOS doesn't read package installers or something and there was no Plex installer for anything but Debian or some such, so there were multiple searches and multiple directions for where to go to fix that. But hey! Plex runs now!
But.
When browsing for media folders inside the Plex interface, the directory tree structure is some hallucinatory variation of what appears in the Files app or via terminal. And Plex totally fails to see some folders, including every one I've created to hold my movies.
When I DO get Plex to see a folder I have movies in, movies that VLC plays just fine locally on the linux box... Plex says "there are no files in the folder."
Back to file sharing: Managed to get samba installed, after many false starts having to do with EOS's underpinnings, I guess. Oh wait,
installing samba doesn't install a GUI for configuring samba. Cut to the end: I spent approximately
4 hours of my free time getting file sharing to work. That's four hours at the terminal or reading how-to guides, none of which were exactly specific to my OS or version. None of which offered the slightest suggestion or confirmation about how to specify the smb connection TO the EOS box on a Mac, so until it worked, I was never quite sure if I was actually just asking the EOS box the wrong thing.
Seemed like some remote desktop for the Linux box would be handy so I looked into that. Not built in. No such thing in the EOS app repository. Options to install one were either frighteningly complex/obtuse/ or simply failed in the most annoying way: completed without error, yet no sign at all that anything has changed or been done.
I also thought I'd look at ZoneMinder for cam management, but the list of prerequisites for it was
severely daunting, and based on my experience that almost NOTHING in Linux is a double click install, or even a simple
- Code: Select all
sudo apt-get install mysql
I decided not to try.
My dip back in the pool of FOSS has once again convinced me that while the waters are inviting, they are deep, dark, tentacles of dependencies await to pull you under, almost all the other swimmers are far away from you and unwilling to do more than toss a brick labeled "READ THE MAN PAGE" to help, and every config file is a shark waiting to bite you if you get one parenthesis wrong.When talking about Linux based Indigo, I think there are two facts many people are not taking into account:
1. Linux is only suitable for people who are already running Linux.2. People who are into HA and already #1 above are already using Home Assistant or Domoticz or OpenHAB. All of which have 0 dollar cost, gigantic open source support and development efforts, and huge installed user bases compared to Indigo.So, aside from those of us in this forum who for some reason feel that Apple's record stock price, continuing high marks from the overwhelming majority of its customers, and post-trillion dollar valuation means the company is about to implode, where is Indigo's market for Linux based Indigo?