The ideal case for me is that I don't need HACS at all. My experience has been the same - I've happily been able to switch to core HA components and stop using HACS ones. It's great to see HA is not idle with success, they are continuing to make new features even when backwards compatibility may break.

I love my A6X2 Nomad, it's a great device. Note that it's an Android based device. For me, I have no interest in hacking it, side loading Android apps, or running Linux on it. It does exactly what I want it to out of the box and serves its purpose perfectly as a low power digital notebook.

Actually native encryption has been a feature of ZFS for a few years now. It's nice not having to have an extra LUKS layer.

Nope, it doesn't work that way. You have to umount it. You could reboot after removing it from fstab, but that's a bigger hammer than necessary.

I finally realised how freecad wants me to use it and found it much nicer to work with after that

Exactly this - once people invest the time to understand the FreeCAD flow, and get over it, they'll find it's an amazing and extremely productive tool.

I tried out SolidWorks and it's a complete mess. You can't just download and install it, it runs a bunch of weird background programs on the computer, and interacting with the multiple web sites is a nightmare. I've been waiting well over a month for them to refund under the promised 30 day guarantee. I'd never, ever do anything with that awful company again.

I'm really looking forward to see how Ondsel does. I've been using it for the last week or two, as it's integrated 0.22 features, and I think it could be a really good thing for the FreeCAD community.

rxvt-unicode - lightweight and nearly perfect, and one of the few that handles fonts well.

Neither of these points are entirely correct.

While remote authentication is the default, you can configure Plex to not require any sort of auth at all for local users. That's how mine is setup, and we can watch content around the house even when our ISP is offline.

I also don't get ads or anything else pushing other content - I only ever see my own. You just have to not show those things in the sidebar. So again, the defaults can be changed.

Definitely worth trying Jellyfin if it works for a particular case. I've tried Jellyfin, Emby, and Plex - but only found the latter to be reliable enough for OTA DVR via an HDHomeRun which is our primary use case.

CAD Sketcher improves Blender a bit, but it's still not good enough to turn Blender into a dimensionally accurate CAD, and I found the UI to be fairly clunky and if anything even less intuitive than FreeCAD, honestly.

X11 is also just a protocol, and will live on with or without Xorg.

Ah, I thought you were displaying on both outputs, not switching between them, hence my mirroring comment. I suspect XFCE, not the DM, detects the output change and takes care of it. You might need to emulate that behavior with a hook of some type that you have to setup yourself with the tiling WM, and you might have to --off the unused display. I'd be willing to bet you can find some sort of hook script out there that can do this, I seem to recall an autorandr program I used in the past where you could set up output profiles. I hope that helps, maybe a little bit.

I have a couple - one doorbell cam and an Argus Pro. I don't really integrate them with my HASS setup though - haven't found a compelling reason to do so. Avoid the battery powered cameras like the Argus Pro though - nearly useless (poor object detection, no RTSP, slow to connect, no HASS integration).

It depends on what you are doing, but there are lots of viable free alternatives. In addition to GIMP you mentioned, take a look at Darktable if you do photo editing. Any piece of complex software takes time to learn.