Have you heard of Ollama? It’s an LLM engine that you can run at home. The speed, model size, context length, etc. that you can achieve really depends on your hardware. I’m using a low-mid graphics card and 32GB of RAM and get decent performance. Not lightning quick like ChatGPT but fine for simple tasks.

Ollama

Have you heard of Homeassistant? It’s a self-hosted smart home solution that fills a lot of the gaps left by the most smart home tech. They’ve recently added and refined support for various different voice assistants, some of which run completely on your hardware. I have found they have great community support for this project and you can also buy their hardware if you don’t feel like tinkering on a Raspberry Pi or VM. The best thing (IMHO) about Homeassistant is that it is FOSS.

Homeassistant Voice Control

Here’s an article with a bit more detail… but I’m still unclear whether these backdoor commands are hardware circuits or firmware logic.

Bleeping Computer: Undocumented “backdoor” found in Bluetooth chip used by a billion devices

Debian is one of the largest GNU/Linux variants out there. Who and what you trust are personal decisions but they’ve got a good reputation.

I’ve run across a couple sites.

https://www.opensourcealternative.to/

https://github.com/sereneblue/awesome-oss

https://opensourcesoftwaredirectory.com/

https://opensource.com/resources

https://www.techradar.com/best/best-open-source-software

Tangentially related: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted

https://noted.lol/

Pretty much the opposite of what you asked for but good to know: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_formerly_open-source_or_free_software

@chirospasm@lemmy.ml beat me to the punch with alternative.to

OpenWebUI supports allowing web searches when submitting prompts to your self-hosted models. Usually I see three web searches per prompt if I enable this feature.

You may not be able to do RAID or other redundant/performant arrays with USB. You can definitely achieve a big JBOD array but it will be less resilient and slower than a RAID array. Enclosures often don’t cool as well so heat may degrade your disks faster as well. I did this for a while with some old disks and some $30 HDD toasters. I only put data on there I could afford to lose. I wish there was a standalone hardware RAID solution… like a NAS without the network. That would have a huge draw for hobbyists that don’t want to buy an expensive NAS. I’ve searched for this but haven’t found anything. Message me if you know of such a product! Maybe consider building your own NAS with an old PC. Way cheaper than a prebuilt and fun to build! I had an old Dell Optiplex 990 that is now a 32 TB NAS. Had to get a new case but it’s a decent backup to my Synology.