All I want is tell the automakers that I'm not changing my phone for my car to work correctly. That should be the case for anyone, especially for those in the tech community. All features/interactions between phone and car computer need to work regardless of the vendor. If not, I don't want your car.

Apple is notoriously poor at this. Just look at the Apple Watch, or unreleased APIs of iOS working with OSX for chat and phone calls.

Google is only marginally better. They're usually late with iOS support and it can be incomplete. It took how long to release iOS support for android wear? Plus, if I don't have a google account, I want to still get maps and services.

I don't want vendor lock-in is the point here. Amazing though that we don't have some sort of standards body out there that could help with these sorts of things.

I quite agree in most cases and am aware of the risks. In this case, cost and energy consumption were the overriding factors. The computer cpu/ram and mobo itself cost $170. Can't even touch 8GB ECC ram for that little, let alone a board and cpu. Good backups help reduce my risk of data loss and with most of my important data in owncloud and gitlab, I have multiple replications to pull from if it does occur.

My low power rig for home server functions:

$30 - IO Crest SATA III 4 Port PCI-e 2.0 x1 Card with Low ProfileBracket (SI-PEX40064) - motherboard only has 2 onboard sata ports
$50 - AMD Athlon 5350 APU, 2.05Ghz, AD5350JAHMBOX
$85 - HyperX 8GB Kit (2x4GB) 1600MHz DDR3 PC3-12800
$35 - GIGABYTE GA-AM1M-S2H AM1 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 Micro ATX AMD Motherboard
$60 - Antec EarthWatts EA-380D Green 380 Watt 80 PLUS BRONZE Power Supply
$125 - 120G SSD Samsung 840
$250 - 2x 3T WD Red
$80 - Silverstone Tek SG02B-F-USB3.0 ABS/SECC Steel MicroATX Desktop Computer Case

Ubuntu 14.04 server. ZFS for storage.

Its not the fastest rig, but quad core, plenty of RAM for a minecraft server, owncloud, gitlab, and plex. Still working on mythtv setup, but might scrap that soon.

With the all 3 drives spun up and server idle, it pulls 39W. With 2 3T drives spun down, its only 19W. I'm very happy with this as my home server.

I've not used it, but Ubuntu 11.10 software center now has a sync option to sync software between computers. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SoftwareCenter#Comparing_and_syncing_installed_software_between_computers

There is a plugin for OO that will take tex and convert it to images for insertion.

http://ooolatex.sourceforge.net/