It genuinely is. I really like the combination with an immutable OS like OpenSUSE Aeon because you have a super stable base that you can add whatever packages you need to via distrobox.
If this were a modest community on a small instance somewhere, you would have a point.
However, politics@lemmy.world is by far the largest general politics community across the entire platform - in essence, it's the default politics community that thousands of Lemmy users will encounter.
It's not too much to ask that they allow the content that the name advertizes, i.e politics in general, not just US politics.
It's a pretty basic screw-up to call your community "politics" when you only allow political topics related to a single country.
It was dumb on Reddit and it is dumb here on Lemmy too, especially since Lemmy is less US-centric than Reddit to begin with.
Communities should be hosted on whatever instance they want with whatever content they want.
Well, not literally "whatever they want". There are community guidelines to consider.
In this case, the problem is not the content but the name. If the title of the community is politics@lemmy.world but it has a rule where only US politics is allowed, then someone done fucked up somewhere.
Genuine or not, it's still up there with "Antifa supported Hitler" in terms of sheer awfulness.
Seriously. This is egregious enough that it makes me wonder if admins can rename communities.
If I were you, I would stick to streaming in that case.
However, if you're dead set on storing files locally and there's no other option but to transcode, then use 128kbps Opus instead of AAC - assuming that iPhones support it (I haven't checked). It's a lot more efficient.
A good converter program to use is fre:ac but don't ask me for an iOS only app because I'm not an Apple guy at all.
Converting from one lossy codec another isn't generally recommended, plus you aren't likely to save that much disk space by converting to AAC.
10 GB is actually pretty small for a local music collection, quite honestly. If I were you, I would try to expand your storage capacity instead of wasting time, and potentially audio quality, by transcoding.
Both of those can be remedied by simply enabling an extension and hot corners respectively.
Debian Sid is even more unstable than Arch, though. I'd never recommend it for anyone who doesn't want to be routinely maintaining their system.
In this case, it's actually a plus IMO. Giving Gnome extension devs a month or so to ensure that any compatibility issues are fixed is ideal.