I use Plex because I already have it in use, though only on mobile/Windows. With real computers, I just mount the music volume and use mpd. Both work pretty well through a VPN too.
depending on your NAS, you might be able to run [0] Logitech Media Server; I still have it running on mine, and use it occasionally - I use it particularly for "play random album" which I have never seen elsewhere, and is great if you have a large collection of ripped music.
I keep things simple on the serving side and just choose an appropriate client. I just use a NFS share on a Raspberry Pi with attached SSD to make FLAC files available on the network.
Playback is with Volumio on a Raspberry Pi that I have connected to the Hifi, Audivana on my Mac, and the nPlayer app on any iOS/Android devices. nPlayer is really great for video too.
I run Navidrome [1] in a Docker container on my Synology NAS.
It’s lightweight, can handle huge music collections, has a good web interface, supports Last.fm scrobbling, transcoding from the most formats and AirSonic-API for use with a wide variety of players/apps.
I run both Plex and Roon on my Synology NAS. The former is used for videos/photos and to share with the in-laws, while the latter is mostly for my own owned & streamed music. Roon's not cheap, but it works for my various use cases for it.
I believe that the best solution would be for Apple to open up iMessage to other platforms. This would allow users to choose the messaging app that they prefer, regardless of what type of phone they have. It would also promote competition and innovation in the messaging market.
For me another frustrating thing when using iMessage on iPhone is that I often receive spam messages from unknown contacts, which I cannot block at all.
Click on the message thread, click on the sender at the top of the thread, select "info" for the contact, at the bottom select "block". Not obvious, I'll agree, but you can definitely block it (it should be a much shorter path). This works for iMessages and SMS.
