Just a quick comment on the Raspberry Pi, or its OS rather. Although I had promised myself that I'd upgrade my long-in-the-tooth Pi 3B+ to a Pi 4, complacency and general laziness intervened. On the one hand, since its main use is as a media-server, the added 'Ooomph' of a Pi 4 is probably not needed - the only media-streaming situation where the 3B+ really struggles is with 1080+ HEVC video - though its lack of memory (1Gig) and abysmal Bluetooth support has always been a major bug-bear.
I had waited for years for the BT issue to be resolved, or at least its problems mitigated, alas in vain. When I realised that the OS itself was no longer being supported, and worse, the repositories themselves had been taken down, I felt saddened at its abandonment by Raspbian - and that I was going to have to shell out for a Pi 4.
Then I discovered that the brand-spanking new OS release available for free from Raspbian's site is backward-compatible with pretty much every piece of hardware that they've released, and all was right with the world again!!!
Even better, they finally have a BT implementation that is pretty close to perfect - at least in operation - I'm not a fan of its UI-accessibility one bit - right-clicking the speaker-icon, left-click output selection, then another left-click to finally select the BT device - way, way too convoluted! Clicking the BT icon itself reveals a non-working means of doing the same thing - so it's obviously a work-in-progress. But once a BT device is selected, it works almost perfectly! One annoyance I've found is that on start-up, although it will automatically connect to the last BT device used (if present), I invariably have to manually select the BT output device for the app in question (VLC, for instance) via the Pulseaudio Control application.
The other huge deal (for me) with the new OS is that VLC now has graphics hardware support by default - no more manually building VLC or searching online for working links to builds.
All in all, I'm very happy with the OS upgrade. The only thing I'd criticise is Raspbian's continuing insistence that users be tied to that awful TrueVNC. I don't care if its developer originated 'VNC' - this is Linux we're talking about, 'freedom of choice' and all that. Currently, rather than having the sane option of using Remmina to access my Pi media-server via my laptop, I either have to 'ssh' onto it if terminal-access will do, or fire up the wide-screen that's connected to it and use a tiny (read, 'uber-cheap') BT keypad. I can control all of my other computers & OS's using Remmina, why not the Pi??!?
Remmina's site FAQ even acknowledges the problem with Pi's, yet doesn't offer a solution (read, link to working s/w) just a 'solution' that's non-working and/or outdated:
FOR THE LOVE OF SANITY, UPDATE THIS PAGE!!!
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