Most are definitely just showing off; “Look at how many photos I have stored,” “I have so many podcasts and ebooks,” “Bow to me, mortals!”
On the flip, some are useful. PeaNUT gives UPS off/on line power status at a glance, Jellyfin shows active streams iirc, FreshRSS shows if there are unread feeds, Portainer shows if any containers have stopped, etc. Jellyfin is a big one since I don’t have to get into the WebUI to see if updates or whatever are going to interrupt someone. Otherwise I’m mostly in agreement and just use links in lieu of widgets and silly API calls.
Most are definitely just showing off; “Look at how many photos I have stored,” “I have so many podcasts and ebooks,” “Bow to me, mortals!”
On the flip, some are useful. PeaNUT gives UPS off/on line power status at a glance, Jellyfin shows active streams iirc, FreshRSS shows if there are unread feeds, Portainer shows if any containers have stopped, etc. Jellyfin is a big one since I don’t have to get into the WebUI to see if updates or whatever are going to interrupt someone. Otherwise I’m mostly in agreement and just use links in lieu of widgets and silly API calls.