There’s quite a few TP-Link Models that can be flashed with open source firmware. The ones I helped friends and family with seemed to get software updates consistently after being discontinued.
This isn’t an all out endorsement, but I’ve certainly seen worse.
What did you do with the school bus?
Rather annoying. You would think that it shouldn’t make a difference whether or not a mounted drive is present in the machine. I run everything I host in containers on a single machine, so I can’t say whether I’d have encountered such issues.
Jellyfin supports audio books too, but I feel that audiobookshelf gives a much neater experience.
No? Kinda? I’d say a Pixel (so Google hardware, yeah) with Graphene, and either self-hosted, or independent end-to-end encrypted could storage.
There are alternatives to the tech conglomerates.