The issue, as always, is that Plex started to put free existing features behind a paywall to squeeze more money out of their client base instead of adding something and charging for it.

VC money came in and now the VC wants to cash in on the investment.

Not OP but I can share my journey through my career.

Depends on where you are in the world and your work ethic.

I was a terrible student with a hard time understanding harder maths (due to my schooling, but that is something specific to my region), and I was still able to graduate with a 3/4.3 score. It was a lot of hard work that I wasn’t prepared to do due to my work ethic. I had to learn to be at least decent fast and the first year was brutal.

My experience is that university is a lot harder than the work after university. But the corporate world can be soul crushing. In big corpos, you usually do the same part of a process where as during university, you do a lot of interesting and varied stuff.

My electrical engineering program was generalist with each semester being a different domain of electrical engineering and me being interesting in embedded electronics. So doing a semester of power transmission lines was brutal because I wasn’t that organised and didn’t like the courses.

Society tend to romanticize engineering, but there is a lot of busywork and project management and you get caught in administrative bullshit just like any other job (ask a software engineer thoughts on stand-ups and agile and be ready to hear horror stories).

But, if you really like engineering, there are those moments of pure engineering that makes you forget all the bullshit around and make the career worthwhile.

So life rambling aside, engineering is a worthwhile career. It is not an easy path, but the work is manageable though sometime overwhelming. Treat university like a 9-5 job with some overtime and you’ll do fine.

I didn’t have to worry about the financial side of things because I live a place where school is cheap and student financial aid is plentiful. So keep that in mind when making your decision because I cannot comment on that part.

When I have to use a Windows machine for whatever reason, the first thing I do is to install Chocolatey so that I can have a decent package manager.

Tired of the constant pop ups in windows 10. The constant upselling of their product.

An OS shouldn’t get in the way of what you are doing and Windows was always popping up some bullshit.

Employers can go suck a big fat cock.

If the enployee can communicate with their managers and co-worker in English when needed and talk in an other language when they talk between them, there’s nothing wrong.

If you stick to popular free software, the jank is limited.

The Linux userspaces have a lot of enthusiastic people that create their own software and share it, and thus it seems like there is lot of janky stuff (because there is).

It feels like Windows has been captured by corporations and so the market is competitive. There isn’t much space for enthusiast developpers to tackle a different vision of a popular software.

So yeah, I agree with you, lots of janky software in Linux, but that’s the beauty of it IMO. If you stick to popular softwares, the jank is somewhat equivalent to Windows.

You’ve used Windows for so long that you don’t remember how it was when you first started using it.

This isn’t different than what you are doing with Linux. The flow gets better and better and you will acquire the experience needed to navigate the issues. It takes time, that’s all.

Yeah, I opened the website thinkint it would be the github list with a better search, but it’s 95% AI crap

Worst than that, you build him a 7 figures company, he keeps all of it.

Not OP you are replying to, but make your own library of parts and footprint, and back it up.

Nothing worst than finding a library online with the part you need only to find that the footprint is not the right one for whatever reason when you ordered the pcb.

It takes more time, but once you have one or two projects under the belt, you will already have 90% of the parts and only need to do a few parts.

When doing your own footprints, if you have the part with you, print the new footprint in the original size on a printer, as they will appear on the PCB, and put the part on the footprint to see if it makes sense. You will see right away if you have a glaring issue with the footprint.

Spend a few hours double, triple checking your PCB design before fab . It takes a lot less time to do that than debugging the hardware. It will reduce your costs, especially as a hobbyist where you aren’t paid by the hour.

If you need a batch order, order prototypes first. A lower volume first will be a bit more expensive, but buying 50+ borked PCB will be a bitch to fix.

I am trying to make my kids happy to the best of my abilities, and hopefully, in time, they will be as curious as I am.

I should definitely think about teaching self reliance when they get older.

Letting go is the hard part. When I am feeling good, it is a lot easier. But my mental health has been rough lately.

I like to think that this isn’t a binary problem. Everything I do to reduce my footprint matters. But lately, it has been hard to reconcile my life with the reality of the climate crisis.

I am not made for politics. I love politics, but I am an anxious person and could not deal with the life of a politician.

I would like to teach some day about my field, and give it a sustainable twist. But for now, I am concentrating on survivingy day to day for the next year.

Thanks for the response, I am in a better mood today and your response gave me some good feelings.

I had my vasectomy, so no more kids.

I often work on my control influence with my therapist and what you wrote really hit home.

Deep down, the crux is the issue is control: I can’t control everything, so I must focus on things that I can control. Taking local actions is something I can do to make me feel better and make the life of people around me slightly better. I should take solace in that to make me more optimist.

I like to say that life is banal and exceptional at the same time.

Billions of people live and have lived, so my existence isn’t that special. But to me, this is the only life I’ve lived and it feels very special.

I agree that most of human history has been hard, but I cannot substract myself from my life and I haven’t lived other, harder lives. So it is hard for me to emotionally understand how bad it was throughout human history and make me feel better.

I do truly believe that humans will survive as a species, but it doesn’t change the fact that my children will live hardship and that it makes me really sad.

I appreciate your input, thanks.

I still have a very young kid, so sleep isn’t good and my energy level is low (contributing to my pessimism), but I am trying to build my community where I can.

I think the next step would be to be more involved in local politics, or more involved in the community at large to feel that at least, I can impact a few people.

I love my children to death and will do what I can within my means to make their life better.

However, I do feel that my regrets are valid. I chose to have children when I was optimist about the future, but my optimism has waned.

They didn’t ask to be born, they didn’t chose me, so having children in this day and age is a selfish want.

I do not share your vision but I appreciate your support.