I installed bluefin on my wife’s laptop, and on a spare laptop, just yesterday 🤭 It really is great.

I think I’ll be putting it on my desktop PC and keep Aurora on my daily driver Laptop.

Either way, we’re all winning 😂

Windows is free for anyone to use indefinitely… If you’re OK with a persistent watermark.

Why even add a premium to the laptop? Let the user decide to use windows as-is, pay a license, or switch to Linux. 🤭

It’s still indexing, but seems to be working as I expect. I really only want it for the contextual search, but it’s nice to know that I can do more with it if/when I move away from the Synology ecosystem. 🫣

Just for clarity, I followed the links they wanted me to follow.

The sketchy tone and vagueness while they “do stuff” after getting your email seem to have no connection to self-hosting at all.

If my intention was not to self-host, they lost me before I could even trust them enough to provide an email address 😟

Register

Provide your email address and agree to let us do stuff, and we’ll send you a verification email to create your account and get started.

Guys, if we’re already paranoid enough to be interested in a product like this, don’t make us paranoid to even want to “get started” using a product like this.

Sounds like a scam, even if they are totally legit.

Figured it out :) It’s indexing my media now!

And to add to that, even with vanilla Gnome, you have the option to do what you like via extensions. If you want it to look like a Mac or Windows UI, you can!

My wife doesn’t care, as long as it works. If I can set up favorites/shortcuts to the stuff she needs access to, she’s golden.

I don’t think Photoprism has contextual search. Anyway, immich installed and running on my NAS 🤭

I’m curious about your choice of Gnome for your wife, though. If she’s hopeless with computers, why give her a less (imho) intuitive DE to play with?

It’s like using a chromebook, and the less there is to click on, the better.

Any software she already uses would be available as a flatpak, so even updating is easier vs windows.

Also, it’s 1am and I’m in the middle of fiddling with a self-hosted docker image of Immich on my Synology NAS… so much for living by my own rules 😂

Are you going to talk down to me because I’m not using Arch? LOL 😆

At my age, I just want something that works. Long gone are the days when I enjoyed staying up through the night to fix shit on my computer. 🤭

I really don’t know what the problem was with Ubuntu. I had issues every time I tried… but funny enough, these problems seemed to only happen if I was running a live USB or an installed copy. Ubuntu or Mint on a VM seems to work just fine! LOL

Oh well, I’m quite happy with where I’m at now, but I’m glad that my past issues don’t seem common or “normal”.

it’s not user-hostile by design like windows

Truth!

You install Linux, and you start using Linux.

With Windows, you go through a painfully long installation process, then spend another hour debloating all the shortcuts and shit it installs. Then more time closing out boxes for offers. Then you have to harden it before your data is stolen…

Don’t get me wrong, Windows has been stable and reliable for me, but this is likely due to the fact that my installation has been tweaked over the years. Using it fresh is a horrible experience. Reminds me of using the internet without an adblocker! LOL

Yes! As much as I wanted to love Mint and Ubuntu, they just didn’t work well for me. Aurora has been amazing.

I am trying to stay with Flatpak apps (for convenience and probably stability, too), but I feel pretty safe installing apps outside of Discover, if needed. Fortunately, most of the stuff I use is already supported as a Flatpak, so it hasn’t been a big shock.

I feel like if people started on Linux first, moving to Windows would seem like a massive PITA and a huge backwards! I’ll be moving my wife to Bluefin in the near future. She’s unbelievably hopeless with computers, but I honestly think it would be easier for her to use Gnome on Bluefin than Windows!

I mean, even just the fact that everything seems to simply work (i.e. drivers) without messing around is mind-blowing. Huge kudos to anyone who’s helped to build Linux into what it is today.

It’ll be interesting to see how my desktop handles it. It’s like 15 years old, and I remember always having to mess around to get things working right, especially wifi.

also to be extra safe you can just mount your external images folder as read only by adding :ro to the docker volume mount so that the container won’t be able to modify anything as a precaution.

This is what I was thinking, too.

Alright, looks like I’ll be setting it up soon! LOL

Is it easy to self-host immich so that it operates on a READ-ONLY basis with my images? I really only want to use it for the local-AI indexing/search, but not as a backup or photo management solution (Synology Photos works just fine for that).

Yes, but is this them being assholes, or them wanting to make sure that users aren’t making their system unreliable? I think there would be a huge distinction there.

For example, say a user wanted to create a cache drive using an SSD. But because the user doesn’t know better, they buy the cheapest crap they can find, install it, and set up caching. But because they’re using cheap shit, the drive is slow and the user reports poor performance, system hangups, and other instability.

Wouldn’t it be in Synology’s best interest to say “here’s a list of drives we know will give you the best experience.”?

Now, Synology has already done that, but users are ignoring it and continue to use poor storage drives expecting to use pretty sophisticated features. What now? Well, Synology disables those features.

For example:

De-duplication, lifespan analysis, and automatic HDD firmware updates could also disappear on non-approved drives

Um, yeah. That makes sense. If a shitty hard drive can’t reliably get firmware updates through the NAS, why on earth would they want to keep that option enabled? Same with lifespan analysis. If a crappy drive isn’t using modern standards and protocols for measuring and logging errors and performance data, Synology really can’t “enable” this to work, can they?

That’s what I think is happening. Although, this could be just greed, too. I don’t think there’s any real problem for most users, unless they say that we can’t use fairly common, high-quality NAS drives from Seagate or WD and must use their own branded drives. I’d have a huge problem with that.

Are we overreacting? Hasn’t Synology always had a list of “certified” drives for their NAS’, which end up being the same HDDs we would tend to use anyway?

I can understand that they don’t want people using any garbage storage drives, which could increase failure and make Synology NAS’ look unreliable.

Unless something has changed, this is how they’ve always done it, just like how every laptop manufacturer will say which RAM and storage works best (for reliability and performance) on their machines.

Man, now that I look, there really are very few that are still in active delopment.

Before Symfonium, I was using FX (also paid) for years, but hated how it didn’t read and cache files from my NAS, so I’d have to use another app to keep my very large library synced with my phone.

I hope you find something that works for you. It’s a shame that we don’t have more options here. I wonder if it’s because more people are moving to streaming platforms, and fewer of us use local/offline collections.