

Off lease corporate thin clients with fresh ssds. You can get something that runs off a laptop power supply, will handle more than you’re going to throw at it, and they’re insanely cheap.
I moved to one from a pi when I got serious about home assistant.
I also run a stack of networking utilities on my OPNSense router.
Jellyfin has been a bit more difficult to transition, I’m still running it on my wife’s gaming computer. I’ve pre transcoded most of our collection, but not all of it. I need to find something very cheap but also capable of handling the odd 4k transcode.






I generally don’t do GUIs for C. But I’m also an embedded C person.
When I have I’ll generate DLLs for the C portion then just pull them into a python based interface or something with easier to deal with gui implementations.
Programming languages are tools. Would you use a wrench to drive a nail? You could. But it would be painful, you’re gonna miss and whack your hand at least once.
If it’s a learning exercise, go for the C implementation, why not? I’ve written an XML parser in LabVIEW. (I never stopped to ask whether I should…) Is that the right tool for the job? Fuck no.
If this is an exercise in software engineering be an engineer and use the 99% already built and verified system to do the job it’s meant to.
Or you can write an entire theme park simulator in assembly because you like pain or something.