I don't want to touch my phone to stream music in my home. I don't want a app involved, apart from maybe setup. I don't want 'cloud' involved _at all_.

I want to point my music 'streaming' device at a NFS or SMB directory and play music. Would be better if it supported some OSS streaming protocol so I could just stream off my LAN (think mpd/dlna but I have no idea what protocols are "best" here).

I'd love to open up foobar2000 or whatever, and point it at what speakers I want and let loose.

Ya, some rpi solution is "probably best here". I know they're(Sonos) going for 'this works for people who dont know what a rpi is", but stereo gear works for a long time. I don't want to be on some 'upgrade cycle' because they've decided I need to upgrade hardware so they can harvest more dollars from my wallet.

Maybe the problem is that ["I have a stereo", "mp3's", "CD's"] and they are targeting people who want to play Spotify from some 'i-device' to a speaker and don't have a stereo. Either way, the hardware is 100% avoid for me. Its a gamble on 'will it work' and 'will they support it?'.

I use the open source Home Assistant software as the hub, keep everything local on my network and only buy devices that can use non-cloud, open protocols. This is the only way to ensure you keep control and won't someday get sold out or bricked.

The open ecosystem around smart home has matured a lot in the last couple of years and Home Assistant now has millions of active users. There are also a wide variety of inexpensive sensors, switches, plugs, etc which come pre-installed with open source firmware like Tasmota and EspHome (example: https://www.athom.tech/tasmota). You won't find them at Best Buy or local stores but they're plentiful on Amazon, EBay and, of course, AliExpress.

To the extent companies like Google, Amazon, Apple and Samsung choose to support open, local-first standards I'll consider their devices as input and output nodes, however, I'll never let them be the central controller. There are now enough savvy open-only, local-first users that many of the Shenzen-based device makers have realized it's a profitable market segment and have given up trying to enforce their cloud-based apps. So we now have plenty of alternatives to the companies who only want users to be subscribers or eyeballs for ads.

As I understand, the problem is that authentication used users from /etc/passwd and allowed to log in as any user, even as system user like "messagebus" which has no password. It is annoying that linux software uses system database for authorization, for example, Postgres and Samba do this and there is always a risk that you have some system user you don't know about which can be used to access your system.

That is a widely held view among Unix nerds like me, at least.