Darktable is fantastic, but the learning curve is steep for great results. It took us months to get comfortable with it after using Capture One, Lightroom, Photoshop/ACR. It's different. Our first efforts looked like crap.
For someone processing just a few files I think RawTherapee is probably easier and likely to give better results with limited effort.
Nice, I'll check it out! I remember LMS and Squeezebox. Didn't know it would sync between rooms, and I didn't know it had been open sourced, that's excellent.
At the time we started in the Sonos ecosystem we wanted easy, and it provided that. Now I've got multiple servers running, self-hosting services for the family, slowly working on removing our cloud service dependencies. So this would fit right in.
Yeah, I get what you're saying. Definitely. It's not complicated for one pair of speakers in one room. For one music source. For one person controlling it.
There just haven't been any better cost-effective solutions with multi-room, control from your any phone convenience. And that's a big plus for how we listen to music. Today there are a few contenders, but many of them are also cloud dependent. Really the small number of good options in this space is proof of how good Sonos was for a long time. Well and also of Spotify causing people ditch the idea of a offline digital music library.
Edit: And to be clear, aside from the "any computer networks" part, this is what the original Sonos device did. It could work without a home network, but worked best with a shared music library on a PC. Didn't need cloud anything, internet connection, account, etc. You just hooked your normal speakers to it and it played music.
That SATA port is what you need. You can use that to connect an external eSATA drive enclosure (external jbod).
For a clean install, get a SATA to eSATA adapter - the kind with an expansion slot plate. Something like a STCESATAPLT1LP. Unscrew the eSATA end from the plate, cut a matching hole in the PC case and mount the port to the hole. This is better than going straight from the internal port in my opinion.
It looks like you have a mini-PCIe slot as well, probably intended for WiFi. That may work with an mSATA to SATA adapter to give you a second port. Or it may work with an mSATA SSD. I would test with something cheap or get confirmation it works from other users of this PC before investing in an expensive SSD.
8bitclassics.com seems to have some.
Or if you are feeling adventurous: https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/13319/how-can-i-make-an-external-psu-for-an-apple-iic
VPN + DDNS is what I do. You may be thinking about the perf hit of putting all your home connections through a VPN. That's not the idea here. For self hosted services you would set up a wireguard "server" at your house. Then you connect your phone back to it to access your services.
With Wireguard it's pretty easy to do a split tunnel, so that the VPN connection is only used for traffic to your home servers. Nothing else is affected, and you have access to your house all the time.
This is better for security than DDNS + open ports, because you only need a single open UDP port. Port scanners won't see that you are hosting services and you wouldn't need to build mitigations for service-specific attacks.
As far as podman, I am migrating to it from a mix of native and docker services. I agree with others that getting things set up with Docker first will be easier. But having podman as an end goal is good. Daemonless and rootless are big benefits. As are being able to manage it as systemd units via quadlets.
LibreNMS hasn't been mentioned yet, and it's very good. It does take some setting up, but its use of SNMP for data collection means that it's easy to collect data from a wide range of network hardware as well. A wide range of alerting is available.
Cca != CCA
The Cca standard relates to the flammability and toxicity of the materials used to jacket the cable. You can read about it here: https://cabling.crxconec.com/en/crx-blog/CRX-Blog-02.html
CCA stands for Copper Clad Aluminum. The actual conductors (each wire) is made from aluminum that has been given a thin coating of copper. This is what you want to avoid since it can be less durable and likely to have more voltage drop for PoE. It's unrelated to the Cca standard.
So assuming you are running this wire for a fixed installation, you should be looking for Cca + solid copper (not stranded). The one you linked to looks good.
Get shielding if it will be run near strong interference sources, and only if the shielding will be grounded.
The WiFi icon with good connection+ exclamation on Android means the connection to the access point is good, but you don't have a path to the internet. I would start by connecting a PC, wired, directly to your router. Make sure that's working. If not, get some specifics on what's failing and troubleshoot.
Then connect to the switch. Repeat. Then connect to an app, repeat.
Do you like birds? BirdNet-Pi might be interesting. https://github.com/alexbelgium/hassio-addons/blob/master/birdnet-pi/README.md
I tasted the rainbow ๐