I disagree that Nix is a solution in search of a problem, in fact it solves arguably the two biggest problems in software deployment: dependency hell and reproducibility (i.e. the “It works on my machine” problem)

Every package gets access to the exact version of all the dependencies it needs (without needless replication like Flatpaks would have) and sharing a flake to another machine means you can replicate that exact setup and guarantee it will be exactly the same

Containers try to solve the same problems, and succeed to a somewhat decent extent, although with some overhead of course.

I’m not trying to criticize you or your setup at all, if Debian alone works for you, that’s fine. The beauty of open source and self hosting is that we can use whatever tools we want, however we want. I do though think it’s good practice to be aware of what alternatives are out there should our needs change, or should our tools change to no longer align with our needs.

Small setups can very easily turn into large setups without you noticing.

The only bare-metal setup I’d trust to be scaleable is Nix flakes (which I’m actually very interested in migrating to at some point)

It’s hard to recommend any Chromium-based browser in 2026 as Chromium no longer supports Manifest v2 extensions, breaking support for essential content blockers like uBlock Origin.

Even Brave, which has a built-in adblocker not based on extensions, is loaded with AI and Crypto bs, and as far as I’m aware, the adblocker portion of its code is closed source. This isn’t even mentioning the horrific political opinions expressed by the CEO of that company.

I keep a copy of raw ungoogled Chromium around for webUSB firmware flashing, but that’s it.

If I were you, I would try and figure out what is causing firefox-based browsers to run slowly - i.e. toggling on/off hardware acceleration in browser settings and see if that makes a difference.

This is a single unofficial client for the mentioned software. LibreTranslate itself is fantastic.

Doing this is generally a bad idea, because audio exported from YouTube is pretty poor quality, and music videos often have bits of talking or silence that make sense in context of the video but aren’t part of the actual song (designed to prevent exactly this). There was a cli tool I used last year that could download music from Spotify directly.

Edit: The tool I was talking about is Zotify

Make sure to set the --download-quality flag to very_high if you have premium to ensure it downloads in max quality

If you have long playlists (more than a few hundred songs), you should also use the --skip-previously-downloaded and --song-archive flags as per the docs to make sure you can start again from where you left off, as Spotify will start to rate-limit your connection and downloads will fail (if this happens, just kill the tool, wait a few minutes and start again)

Navidrome can scrobble to ListenBrainz which starts giving you recommendations playlists after a couple of weeks :)

In other news, a mysterious sudden increase in average service charge prices…