Yeah this is actually a pretty poor report… though I’d expect nothing less from Consumer Reports that has been an awful rag for at least a decade.

This is classing trim and rattle issues as a reliability issue which it just isn’t. And Tesla for all the great stuff they have accomplished have definitely had a massive problem with fit and finish which has skewed these numbers to an atrocious degree.

You go look at EV’s from established car manufacturers who have experience in fit and finish and you’ll find a different story entirely. My Polestar 2 has been insanely reliable; it hasn’t left me stranded once in 2 years and 36,000 miles except yesterday when an augur bit lying in the road punched through my tire and rim… hardly a problem with the car. It has been in the shop twice; once for maintenance and once for a headlight unit that failed. By time I had my previous ICE vehicle for that amount of time I’d had electronic issues that had stalled the car twice, a fuel pump replaced and been through a total of 3 tires and two rims due to damage on the roads.

EV’s have far fewer critical moving parts to fail and have a surprising amount of redundancy built in. Heck, a critical failure of a motor won’t even necessarily stop most dual-motor EV’s unless it fails in a way that freezes up the drive shaft.

I haven’t suffered hate as much as incredulity. People who’ve never owned an who just don’t understand why anyone would own a car that can “only go 200 miles”. I mean seriously? How many days a year does one ACTUALLY drive more than 200 miles at a sitting? I commute roughly 60 miles a day in total which is actually on the high side in the USA and I’ve never had a single issue with that even if I have to run around and pick up supplies. Heck, on Wednesday I ended up driving over 100 miles that day because I had to drive to a supplier to pick up a bunch of material and wasn’t worried in the slightest about the range in my car. I start every day with a 90% charge and a warm cabin (yay preconditioning!)

Even as bad as Electrify America has gotten, I’ve also driven my car long distances on a number of occasions and it’s been a nonissue. Recently had to visit a customer in Minneapolis (about 600 miles) and I drove up one day, spent two days with the customer and then drove home on the Saturday. It was a nice and relaxing drive with zero stress about charging. It did help that the hotel had chargers, but even if it hadn’t it wouldn’t have been an issue.

I think the weirdest experience I ever had was charging at an EA station and having the EA maintenance guy trying to tell me how terrible all electric cars were for the environment and how they were just a fad that would fizzle out when the “woke media get bored with the story”.

Good. The traditional auto manufacturers who are avoiding or ignoring EV’s because it’s difficult are going to get their asses handed to them by the little guys.

Hey Ford, Toyota et al; just because you can’t do it doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Difficult, maybe… but while you’re clutching your pearls and declaring how impossible it is, someone else is going to figure out how to make it better, quicker and cheaper than you and they’ll eat your lunch.

This happens all the time to incumbents… look at IBM.

It’s a homelab. I start from scratch about every 2 years just because I can.

The only consistent element is the data on the system… the operating system, applications and frameworks often get a workout.

Having said all that, my current setup is working exceedingly well for my use case and I don’t know that I’m going to change it en-masse any time soon. Individual apps will change though I’m sure.

It depends greatly what you’re doing with your computer. I’ve been an Ubuntu primary user for at least a decade now, but there are still one or two things I can’t do with Linux… at least not as easily. Specifically in my case I have a PC dedicated to my synthesiser/MIDI setup simply because drivers, tools and plugins are readily available and supported on Windows while in Linux the support is good but has issues. A prime example is that my main synths are Roland synths, and Roland has a bad habit of not supporting standards fully for audio or MIDI over USB. I love my Roland synths but it made it too difficult to go Linux primary. That and some of the best tools are Windows-based like Ableton. However, that’s not to say you can’t do all of this in Linux; Renoise is a fantastic DAW as well that runs natively in Windows or Linux and there are plenty of great audio editing tools… it’s just interfacing with external gear is sometimes problematic and again some of my synths are plugins (VST’s) that either don’t work or aren’t well supported in environments other than Windows and Mac.

If your primary use case is web browsing and maybe gaming (Steam works great with their Proton runtimes for most games) then you can easily switch to Linux and never miss a beat. Firefox and Chromium (not Chrome) are great and well supported, and while Microsoft Office isn’t directly supported you can run the web Office365 just fine or install LibreOffice and still mostly be able to edit documents and files. For photo editing and the like there’s GIMP and if you’re a photographer there are amazing tools like DarkTable that are absolutely brilliant and in some cases are so good I would run them on Windows as well.

Ubuntu is probably one of the most mature and well-supported distros out there. Mint is also good and you won’t have any trouble with it, but when you do have issues with it the amount of support you can get for Ubuntu is among the best. There are things that Canonical do that annoy the Linux purists (systemd, Wayland as prime examples) for the average user these issues are pretty much moot. Even I who first installed Slackware Linux in 1993 and liked it don’t really care too much because the operating system gets out of my way and just works. I have one tool that requires me to run Xorg instead of Wayland (the GUI framwork… it’s complicated) but that’s literally the only issue I’ve had.

HTH

This has been a great discussion here… let me add a few things from my perspective of 30-odd years in the IT space;

• I like to use stuff that’s fit for purpose. Windows 10, Windows 11 and such are desktop operating systems that are fit for their purpose and are very good at it. But they’re less optimal for server-type workloads. Microsoft themselves provide a different operating system for that purpose but it has a different cost model that is a lot higher.
• Access to the GUI is necessary to run Windows. NAS devices and such have the ability to run “headless”; that is no keyboard, monitor or mouse. NAS devices also have a “network first” mentality where everything must be accessible on the network even in the event of a system failure. Recovery cannot require a monitor if you can’t plug one in! Windows (even server) requires physical access.
• Server-focused platforms like NAS provide a lot of capabilities that Windows does not because of the nature of their platforms. For example Synology allows growing your storage easily while Windows requires a lot more technical knowledge to accomplish that.
• Going back to fit-for-purpose; NAS devices provide security that isn’t necessarily there with Windows. Windows has a lot of “moving parts”… in addition to the operating system there are a bunch of ancillary libraries, tools and software that may or may not be used when using Windows as a server. All of these additional tools and libraries provide another potential vector for security breaches especially if not individually maintained thus increasing the maintenance requirements of the system. NAS devices give you the basics of what they need to operate and no more… well that’s until you start adding service packages to a Synology. But even then they will all be managed through the stock package manager and thus updated and maintained, and will still only be as much as you need to get the job done.

As far as my most recent experience with desktop Windows that I find irritating, there are a couple of reasons I still wouldn’t use it as a server platform ;

• Microsoft has a tendency to randomly update your settings, overriding your own settings with what they think are better. A good example that hit me recently is that some recent update overrode my power management settings on a PC I have set up as a headless desktop I then connect to using NX. I had it set to never sleep… suddenly it started sleeping. I had to reset it in order to get back to where I wanted it. This is not the first time this has happened, and I’ve had other issues along these lines. 24x7 isn’t possible when your PC goes to sleep…
• Windows lacks a really solid local filesystem. NTFS is OK and is pretty performant but it lacks a lot of the more advanced features of filesystems from NAS vendors or *NIX systems; ZFS and others have checksumming and scrubbing, most NAS vendors allow scheduled data integrity checks and the like… things like that.
• Software RAID in Windows is acceptable, but is not great. It’s hard to understand when things aren’t working properly and thus plan to replace failed hardware.

Hope that helps :)

The car forums are still there, but you’re right they’re pretty dead. I think a lot of it is that car culture is dying a hard death. My generation (Gen-X) and some Millenials seem to be the last people who really “dig” cars, while “Gen Z” and onward seem to be less interested in cars in general. Most of them seem to see it as an appliance, and the remainder seem to see it as an abomination… perhaps rightfully so.

It’s been a slow death… it’s been going on for decades at this point. Car culture has been less and less interesting to younger people for a long time and it hasn’t been helped by the relative homogenization of vehicles and brands. I mean, where’s the excitement when GM produces like 8 different cars in 50 different flavors that all taste of vanilla?

I’ve had enthusiast cars for years… heck even my Polestar 2 is the most “enthusiast” EV of the last few years… something that hasn’t really changed all that much. I had higher hopes for the Taycan until I actually drove it… it was a fine car but honestly I thought my Polestar was more fun to drive. There are some upcoming models that look good, and the most recent changes to the Polestar 2 made it an even better drivers car… but beyond the usual “Teslarati” I just don’t see people getting passionate about EV’s. Hell, I’m not really that passionate about my EV except I enjoy driiving it… but the number of modifications I can make are severely limited. More and more my car and everyone else’s are becoming more like cellphones on wheels; appliances that are really useful, really good at what they do and fundamentally disposable.

What car culture remains is locked in those forums and leaks occasionally to more open forums like Reddit, but looking for help with a modern car is a losing game even when not looking at EV’s. Go to a BMW or Audi forum… or hell even a Porsche forum and most of the time the first answer to any problem with anything newer than about 10 years old is “Go to the dealership / NAPA Auto Parts, attach a scan tool and find out what’s wrong.” After that 99% of the time after the person gets a readout they either get it fixed at the dealership and never post about their resolution, or they come back to the forums and get told to take it back to the dealership or an indy mechanic to fix. There’s no “shadetree mechanics” for most of these rolling computers, and without that there’s not much to talk about with the cars.

I could ramble about this all night but I’m not going to LOL. This already got far longer than I’d expected.

Yup… upvoted. Range is moot because most people can’t sit still for 5-6 hours at a stretch… or shouldn’t. Current EV’s with 300 mile range are more than good enough and frankly I’ve not had a problem with my ~220 mile Polestar 2 even despite multiple cross-country trips (600 miles or thereabouts).

The charging infrastructure needs to be a LOT better and a lot more reliable. The compute in most of our cars or on our phones is more than enough to properly plan a route but it does assume the charger is working or working at a decent speed. My last trip I avoided Electrify America like the plague despite still having free charging from them because every EA charger I’ve been to in the last 6 months seems to max out at 80kw when I had previously seen 155kw consistently on those exact same chargers.

Charging speed is also a bit of an issue with the current crop of EV’s, but not nearly as bad as people think. I took to taking shorter spans between stops at lower SoC on a recent trip too and when I was able to keep my charging about 150kw it made my trip slightly shorter than what I had been doing previously. But there are still too many massive “charging deserts” in the US (try driving from Michigan down to Indianapolis and see how much fun it can be with zero fast charging between the Ohio/Indiana/Michigan border and Indianapolis)

Personally I DO self-host… and I have very few problems. I get blacklisted occasionally but it’s not been a huge concern and is usually only the low-priority blacklists… I did have to go through jumping through hoops early on to get my IP accepted but I haven’t had problems in years.

For my mail server these days I use Docker Mailserver. It’s really complete as a server (no frontend though) for setting up a really good IMAP/SMTP server. I have a full docker swarm cluster running here that keeps it VERY reliable. For a frontend on my desktop I use Evolution or Thunderbird (I’m a Linux user).

For a web frontend I have a few I have played with. My current “primary driver” is Snappymail acting as a plugin to my NextCloud instance. However I’ve had good experiences using E-Groupware which is VERY feature complete as an Outlook alternative.

Hope that helps!