Thanks everyone, I feel much better about moving forward. I’m leaning towards Proxmox at this point because I could still run Windows as a VM while playing around and setting up a new drive pool. I’d like a setup that I can gradually upgrade because I don’t often have a full day to dedicate to these matters.

MergerFS still seems like a good fit for my media pool, simply only to solve an issue where one media type is filling a whole drive as another sits at 50% capacity. I’ve lost this data before and it was easy to recover by way of my preferred backup method (private torrent tracker with paid freeleech). A parity drive with SnapRaid might be a nice stop gap. I don’t think I feel confident enough with ZFS to potentially sacrifice uptime.

My dockers and server databases, however, are on a separate SSD that could benefit from ZFS. These files are backed up regularly so I can recover easily and I’d like as many failsafes as possible to protect myself. Having my Radarr database was indispensable when I lost a media drive a few weeks ago.

Good catch, yes my drives are 12TB. My brain is still stuck in 2005. :)

I still use Plex because they offer the product I bought, an easy way to stream content on my devices. Others have technical or philosophical issues, which I totally understand. Plex is the easiest option for my situation as of now. It is working great for me and my family.

Nothing lasts forever so it’s good to realistic about the future. If I start having technical issues, it’s Jellyfin. If Plex doubles down on subscriptions, it’s Jellyfin.

If you’re like me, a lifetime Plex Pass holder, I would experiment with Nginx Reverse Proxy now so you understand how it works. I have Overseerr running through a reverse proxy now.

I think it’s a matter of when, not if, Plex will make a business decision that pushes me off their platform. It’s a company focused on profit and that’s fine. And it would be good to be prepared for the future.

Do a barrel roll!

That’s Apple engineering for you: 60 percent of the time it works every time. I grew up with Apple products and the company’s history is lined with head-scratching design choices. It’s been like that since the Lisa.

I like repairable, self-built desktop PCs myself. But for work, the MacBook has been a tank.

My MacBook survived after I left it on top of my car as I drove off. It was flung off into a pedestrian area at the first intersection and has a nice dent on the corner.

Daylight savings time moves the clock to match sunrise and the time we wake up.

I live in the northern hemisphere and the days are shorter in the winter. The sunrise is 8 a.m. on the shortest day (December 21), while sunrise on the longest day (June 21) is 5:45 a.m.

If I’m a farmer and I get up for my chores at 5 a.m. everyday, it’s nice and sunny in the warmer months. By the time it’s October, I wake up well before the sun so I might as well wait another hour. Lots of people had the same idea. Eventually everyone agreed on a day, called it daylight savings time and figured moving the clocks by one hour was simple enough.

But now it’s the 21st century, we have atomic clocks and most people live in the city but it’s hard to break tradition.

Yup! Or more specifically, “noon dinner.”

It might be a Midwest farming thing where there are multiple snack times between chores outside. Two generations ago, my family had a quick 5 a.m. breakfast and lunch (or second breakfast) in the morning These weren’t full meals in the traditional sense. Dinner meant coming in and sitting at the table for a prepared meal. Otherwise it was just stopping in the house for a small bite and a drink.

In the afternoon, they had tea time at 3 p.m. (black tea with snack cakes or open-face sandwiches). By evening, there’d be a last big meal (supper) before going to bed.

It was super confusing for me being the first generation that didn’t grow up on the farm.

Wait until you have family that say that daily meals are chronologically “breakfast, dinner, and supper.”

It’s my new go-to mobile time killer. I think it works well on a touchscreen.

If Civ 7 reviews well and works on Steam Deck, I’ll be tempted.

I’ve been a patient gamer since buying used NES games as a little kid, but I’ll buy at launch every once in a while. I was a single adult with a full-time job when Mario Maker came out. I took a day off work just to play it nonstop. It was a childhood dream of mine to design and play my own levels and spent my teenage years making ROM hacks with Lunar Magic.

I still think about how great that day was, staying home all day to play. Sometimes it’s nice to treat yourself.

So far so good for me. I switched last week after dual booting Pop OS and Windows 10 for a few months. I used to use Mac OS X back in college and missed the interface, so Pop OS’s implementation of GNOME felt good.

As for OP’s question, someone else with more knowledge can answer if a specific distro has the best drivers/compatibility with games. Pop OS comes with NVIDIA drivers which works for me.

I also wanted a full desktop OS. Some of the distros will focus on being a controller-friendly frontend for gaming rather than a desktop OS.

It might be helpful to try something like Ventoy for any distros that support a live CD. You won’t be able to fully test gaming performance, but Ventoy lets you try multiple distros on one disk.

Other questions for OP: What type of GPU are you using? What is your current OS?

My i5 6600k will turn 10 years old this year. I’m fortunate because upgrading to 32 GB should keep it running for a while still.

Hell yeah, keep chugging little guy 🤘

If Android is okay, I’d recommend the ONN 4K Pro player from Walmart (if located in the U.S.) with some privacy caveats:

• Do as little with Google: Make a throwaway login if Google requires one to get the device started up. Try to avoid Google Play Store as much as possible. If privacy from Google isn’t a concern, feel free to use your Google account to download apps from the Google Play Store.
• Learn how to sideload apps: There are multiple ways to do this, like a USB drive or FTP server.
• Pick an alternate launcher: This will replace the default Android TV OS UI with one that has much more flexability and no ads. FLauncher and Projectivity are ones that I recommend to friends.

The final product is a modern streaming device with much more flexability than any other store-bought device. Building a HTPC with Linux is probably the true self hosted option. Personally, I’m able to afford some privacy sacrifices with Google for something that “just works.”

I always wanted one so bad but never picked one up