Because family or friends are always going to have them and share with you. In terms of effort, it’s still a lot easier to use free-to-you streaming services (even with ads) than set up your own Jellyfin, Radarr, Sonarr, and Jellyseerr stack. I can definitely see the appeal of a streaming stick that let’s you do that, is fast, and isn’t riddled with ads on the home screen. Hell, I might’ve paid for one if I knew it existed and had less free time.

Pi 4B with 4 gigs of RAM. And yes! I was surprised, but it had absolutely no trouble with playing 4k, especially after using a wired connection.

Not easily. There are a few 3rd-party add-ons by random people which technically allow you to watch these services if you enter your account details, but the UI is generally just a list of movie and show titles with no or small thumbnails and no other info. It’s worth doing this if you already have your own media server but not really otherwise.

Pi 4B with 4 gigs of RAM. You might be able to get away with 2gigs because of how well it runs for me, but idk. I didn’t follow any guides for setting up the Pi or LibreElec. It’s honestly super intuitive. Like I said, everything is set up through the GUI. The only slightly technical part is flashing the LibreElec image to the SD card, and even that is super easy. I did follow the Jellyfin documentation for setting up my Jellyfin server, but that’s a whole other thing.

It was a Raspberry Pi 4 model B. I got it for $60 and a 25ft Ethernet cable for $10 on Amazon just because I had a gift card. You can probably find it somewhere else for cheaper. You also need a small micro SD card for the Pi. Maybe only 8 or 16 gigs because it doesn’t store the media locally.

I recently stopped using my firestick. Even though I only used it for Jellyfin, the ads on the home screen were too much for me. So I swapped it out for a Raspberry Pi with LibreElec as the OS, and there have been literally no downsides.

1. Jellyfin for Kodi add-on with Embuary skin shows your entire Jellyfin library on the home screen with continue watching and next up widgets right there when you turn on the TV.
2. You can set it up entirely through the GUI. Works with either keyboard and mouse or remote.
3. Uses HDMI-CEC so works with my TVs original remote and even my firestick remote.
4. If you want to use an app remote, Kore is officially supported and has no ads.
5. Invidious add-on with the Send to Kodi and libredirect Firefox extensions means I can cast YouTube videos to my TV with no ads.
6. You can even run an Ethernet cable from your router/Jellyfin server to the Pi. I did this and have not experienced any buffering since.
7. It even passed the spouse test. My wife says she likes that it’s faster and more responsive. Plus she likes the asteroids screensaver.

I, too, was initially bummed about Obsidian not being open source, but the offline mode and the stylish markdown rendering eventually sold me.

Plus, I set up SyncThing to sync my notes between my phone, server, and laptop. Now I have all my notes backed up and accessible on all my devices, without anything leaking to a 3rd party.