Particularly in the mid-to-late 00's, centre speaker dialogue was very bombastic and stood out very well even in high action scenes. Yes the volume was still sometimes mismatched, but not to the point a discreet multi-channel setup needed to constantly adjust volume. Films from the previous two decades had even less issues just thanks to the simplicity.

Atmos feels like a huge wasted potential to me personally. With the added height channels, you can create some amazing effects and absurd imaging that was never possible before, but the reliance on this kind of swerved sounds and vocals to overlap each other in more awkward ways that makes it feel like everything is originating from a reverberation chamber. Particularly with dialogue, Atmos helps create positional ambiance with indoor scenes, so vocals often sound muddier than they should be.

Even worse, streaming services provide a mix that obviously caters to handheld devices, TVs and soundbars, while being Atmos 7.1.4, sounding particularly terrible for both kinds of watchers. Blu-ray's thankfully still often directly target home theatres and sound much better for the latter.

That's just been my experience so far. Going from a simple 5.1 Jamo from 2007 to an upgraded Atmos setup, I've been blown away far less by action films these days. It's even amazing if you hear the rears getting utilised at all.

The "Enhance Dialogue / Reduce Loud Sounds" feature on the Apple TV has been amazing for helping to rectify this, but I would prefer to leave the dynamic range of the track alone.

I share the same experience with Snapdrop-like websites, self hosted or otherwise, where establishing connections would have a 30% failure rate, speeds progressively deteriorate on very large files, and bundling files together would need them to zipped first which can waste time. LocalSend has none of these issues and has been rock solid in my year of use so far, and I also like that it can send plaintext easily, which fills the gap sites like SimpleSavr and Pushbullet would normally cover.

The only caveat is that you need to have the application installed on all the devices you want to use it with (so it's not a true universal AirDrop or QuickShare alternative) but for your own devices, this is fine.

(1) https://localsend.org/

It's such a simple, quality of life improvement for certain apps that I know I never want to phone home for any reason outside of 'cloud centric' features. Blocking traffic and DNS requests by hand is time-consuming, and new servers / connections can prop up at anytime without one's knowledge, not to mention you might block a domain for a specific app but need it for another (star.c10r.facebook.com for example, which also blocks Meta AI research websites).

I kind of get why they wouldn't, such as unexpected behaviour, sweet data collection and license checking, but man. At least a handful of custom ROMs and local-VPN privacy apps on Android allows for this.

RDP as a regular or quick solution is actually really decent in this respect.

(1) https://app.lizardbyte.dev/Sunshine

(2) https://www.kasmweb.com/community-edition

Ideally, you could self host only the Piped framework and connect this to Yattee without hosting the WebUI frontend, but without the latter, you cannot create a user for yourself to store subscriptions, and using the provided AIO Docker Images is overkill for self hosting as you are required to purchase and point to DNS records for this system (mostly to the benefit of publically hosting an instance of Piped). Invidious is more suited for this regard, but has issues with parsing some videos and their metadata (usually new uploads for a week, Vevo Music Videos etc.)

When it has to roar however, the draw is substantial compared to my ODroid, but since it idles the majority of the time, I'll take it.

When I (and many others) first started out using Linux, this was when the most trouble was likely to crop up. Over time, one learns and adapts to certain intricacies, hardware or methodologies used, and hopefully good practises, such as avoiding utterly rubbish or quaint distributions. Of course no scenario is bound to be 100% trouble free, but this is a far cry from an inexperienced user.

Even if I were to accept the premise that the other users are simply "doing nothing interesting", what would your idea of interesting be? Is it heavily exotic in nature (which I do agree in this case), or things that fall outside the purview of web browsing, document editing and leisurely activities? These things can also cause trouble outside the fault of a user for any reason, but this doesn't necessarily mean that they are inexperienced or do nothing interesting.

If you can elaborate more, I'd be interested to gauge if I agree in a new context.