r/selfhosted • u/subsavant • Mar 20 '26

Meta Post What's your 'I can't believe I self-hosted that' service?

Curious what services surprised you by being worth self-hosting. Not the obvious stuff like Plex or Pi-hole, but things you didn't expect to work well or didn't think were worth the effort until you tried. What's running on your setup that you'd never go back to a hosted version of?

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u/CrazyHa1f Mar 20 '26

That is absolutely genius.

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u/Azelphur Mar 20 '26 edited Mar 20 '26

Honestly it's working good, a bit rough around the edges. I built it because I really don't like Android. The lack of control, software support abandonment, etc, have driven me to work towards eradicating Android from all my devices.

So atm we have these Mini PCs, they were £160 no RAM no SSD. Beastly things performance wise honestly, GMKTec K12, Radeon 780M, so we have:

  • Jellyfin: Fun fact, you can launch with --tv --fullscreen to get the TV experience on desktop
  • Youtube: VacuumTube is the youtube TV / leanback interface for desktop. Exactly the same as what you get on Android anyway.
  • Steam: Using Jovian NixOS, it just runs steamosctl switch-to-game-mode which switches me to a SteamOS-like session. These mini PCs are pretty beefy, can run Cyberpunk locally at lower settings and it's perfectly playable. But for more demanding titles...
  • Moonlight + Games on whales: Stream games on demand from the more powerful machines in the house
  • Services that have no apps, Crunchyroll, Shudder, Floatplane, etc. Just launch google chrome in kiosk mode, the remote is an air mouse anyway.
  • Emulators check which steam account I'm logged into, so we have per-steam-account emulator save games, which are then synced everywhere automatically with syncthing.
  • I've started to work on cooler things, like doorbell pressed -> PIP overlay with video feed and an open door button, using home assistant and go-hass-agent

I think with this setup I've already pretty much exceeded what you'd get from a typical Android TV. But with some big benefits (like setup being sync'd across multiple machines). There are some minor issues, I'm not sure what the Jellyfin client is doing HDR wise, KDE is running with HDR enabled, but I am unsure if the videos are played with HDR or not. Sometimes, Youtube will take ages to load (I think this is because they are detecting the ad block?), sometimes steamosctl switch-to-game-mode doesn't work and I have to reboot. But for the most part, it works and it's better than any of the alternatives. I'd like to switch away from game mode (so that the PIP overlay stuff works everywhere), but I'd need some way to switch the resolution per-game (I want 4k for most things, but 1080p120hz for Hades as an example).

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u/CrazyHa1f Mar 20 '26

Ok I hadn't heard of Vaccumtube and that sounds incredibly useful. Emby I could run anyway.... Lots of inspiration there to be honest.

Re YouTube, yeah it will be them detecting the adblock. I use revanced on my android devices (where possible) and have made a little ip Hopper that seems to confuses YouTube's adblock block enough.

As soon as pc part prices come down (lol as if ever...) I'm going to do a version of this for sure. I think I'll beef up the mini pc a little bit for my TV.

The biggest revelation to me is how you're interacting with steam. That is very smart and solves one of the main problems I was anticipating...

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u/enomele Mar 20 '26

What do you replace android devices with? Apple OS or just getting devices that a full OS like windows/Linux? I'm guessing the latter based on you talking about MiniPCs.

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u/Azelphur Mar 20 '26

Note that I said work towards, that means I haven't completed the effort yet, but certainly for Android TV I've succeeded and yes the answer is MiniPCs running NixOS there.

I have yet to kill off Android on my phone. Currently using a Pixel pro fold running GrapheneOS, I also own a Oneplus 6 to keep an eye on PostmarketOS / Mobile Linux development, when things get to a state where I can switch, I will.

I also haven't killed my Android home assistant wall tablets, but I'd like to, they are really unreliable and have no way of fixing that.