Android sucks. Android TV players have all the issues that Android phones have. They never get patched. We are stuck with the shipped OS because those are never upgraded by the vendor, and we'd stuck with some bad app-store.
Raspberry Pis run Linux AND feel like Linux. No phoning home to Google. No bloated Java crap software required. Most use APT, so
sudo apt install and
sudo apt upgrade are how you maintain the system, just like you do with Ubuntu. Raspbian, the normal Raspberry-Pi distro, is based on debian. It "feel" right.
Debian supports repos, PPAs, installing from source, and all the other normal OS and packaging methods. My r-pi v2 is still great as a 1080p driver for our projection system and THX receiver. I have a r-pi v3 as well, but the extra performance doesn't make any difference for audio/video playback, so it isn't hooked up to the projection room. A r-pi v4 is a huge leap in capability. BTW, all of these can run home document, storage, calendar, servers fine. I don't do that, but people do. Some people run Nextcloud on their raspberry PI systems and have it do
- documents
- calendars
- email
- music
I do run mpd on my r-pi systems next to OSMC for nice music playback controlled by any mpd client. ncmpc is the Linux client I use. On android (phones/tablets), MAPS - I think that's the name - connects to any of my 3 mpd servers depending on which room I'd like to listen inside.
NFS can be very secure with server-to-server Kerberos authentication and AES encrypted connections, but most people in home environments want simple and fast, that isn't open to the world. NFS is the native file sharing used by Unix systems for 30+ yrs. It is server-to-server, unlike Samba which is user-to-server. NFS supports native POXIS users, groups, and permissions. chmod works, provided the underlying file system supports is, so be certain to avoid Windows-file systems like NTFS. Use EXT4, if you don't have a specific reason to use something else. NFS is two installs (one on the client and 1 on the server), then a config file on the server, which says which clients can connect and how, then on each client system, the fstab says where to mount the storage. For streaming videos, DLNA seems the best, then NFS, then CIFS as the worst.
There are 2 bad things about NFS.
1) Clients and servers are usually determined purely by IP address, so both should have static IPs. If you don't manage your network so every server and client has static IPs, this will suck for you.
2) userids and groupids - the numbers - have to match between the clients and servers. Use the 'id' command. It is only those numbers that matter, not the names. People with OSX run into a problem immediately because OSX starts uids at 500 and Linux starts them at 1000. So, one of those systems needs to change the uid for the users. There is an ID-mapping tool, but I've never seen it work or got it working myself. In a corporate environment, users and groups are centrally managed via LDAP, so this isn't an issue. Only the users and groups that actually make use of the NFS storage need to be carefully mapped, so it isn't like we need to map the 20-50 daemon/service accounts between all the systems. Usually, it is just the human users and perhaps the DLNA server account. It isn't the end of the world if the userids don't map 1-for-1, but security will likely be less if not.
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