Yes, the restriction to a single VPN client is annoying.
Blocking ad/telemetry domains can be done by adding Adguards DNS servers in the OS settings. Sadly blocking apps Internet permissions completely is not possible (except on OS like LineageOS, CalyxOS or GrapheneOS).
Symphonium is a great Android music player which connects to a Subsonic or Jellyfin server (or any other protocol like SMB).
Navidrome is a music server which implements the Subsonic protocol. This means apps like Symphonium can connect to it.
Any old PC is enough, even a Raspberry Pi is fast enough for a music server.
Anything more like SSL (https) and a domain is optional for getting it working, and only a benefit if used outside of your home network. Using Tailscale makes a domain/SSL unnecessary and also no longer needs messing around with networking (e.g. no opening ports on the router).
It's difficult to know how much of a difference it makes, but I also think it's at least a reason. Given Nintendo is also going after sites like Vimm's Lair, which does not host recent consoles ROMs, it's not the only reason.
Yes. 1TB SSDs can be bought new for 50€, 500GB for even less. For some people this is expensive depending in the region (e.g. I also know someone who uses an HDD). But given the price of other pc parts it isn't something to cheap out on (a 1TB/2TB HDD is also 50€).
The survey was originally sent out on reddit /r/selfhosted, so I expect most respondents are from there.
Global hotkeys have been addressed on KDE, but no applications actually support it — one of the reasons being that no other desktops support it. Typical chicken-egg problem.
No, I haven't connected a Pi to a 4k TV.
FreeTube does not have controller support, and for AndroidTV I'd recommend SmartTube.
Kodi/LibreELEC is able to do all of it, but IMO it's not a good experience for browsing YouTube and I don't know how well the third party Steam Link integrations work.
This is why I'd also recommend LineageOS Android TV, which supports Pi's thanks to konstakang. But I'm not sure why it'd work better than a FireTV stick, since both run AndroidTV.
Edit: I've had an issue where the Pi 5 wouldn't boot AndroidTV, until I tried to turn it on again after a few weeks. So I'd recommend sticking with the FireTV + SmartTube + Jellyfin + Steam Link (unless you've got a Pi 5 lying around anyway).
Edit 2: The Pi 5 + Android TV had issues with HDMI-CEC of the TV, so I had to buy a remote with a USB adapter. This sends the wrong signals (e.g. keyboard enter, not what Android TV expects), which is fixable with some app remapper. Maybe it'll work better for you, but the FireTV is likely the easier solution.
I agree that there are many great free streaming sites out there, with 1080p and good quality.
But quality is still an advantage of paid services (or acquirung the larger files in other ways). Streaming with higher bitrate costs way more bandwidth (= money) while being marginally better.
It's noticeable though, if you have a good, large enough display. Especially darker scenes suffer from low bitrate. On my phone I don't notice it at all.
That's even true for high bitrate. E.g. I've even compared a Reacher WEB-DL to BluRay remux, and the latter was noticeably better — not that it's worth the additional storage usage.
What RAID system did you use which corrupted your data on power loss? With software raid like zfs I believe corruption on power loss shouldn't be a problem (unless the hardware fails. Or your using btrfs raid 5/6, ignoring all warnings).
Edit: For this reason I'm looking into buying another drive for an offline backup of my media files. I could redownload them, but it'd be increasingly more annoying.
I remember taking my first selfhosting/Linux steps a year or so after the launch of Let's Encrypt with a Pi 3. At the time, most tutorials didn't set up https at all, and if they did, they were self signed certificates (resulting in browser warnings).
Self-signed certificates are annoying and creating them was a series of copy pasting long, weird commands, usually using long exspiration dates (manual renewing sucks).
Not long after, guides started recommending certbot. Nowadays reverse proxys like caddy set up TLS automatically.
At least that's how I remember it, given my complete lack of knowledge about Linux at the time.