Climbed a tree, tried to jump to the next tree. Failed. Fortunately, I snagged a wasp nest on the way down. Nothing broken, anaphylaxis. Not breathing sucks. (I lived.)

I always wanted to try catfish, and there was a restaurant I really like that does everything else really well, so I tried it and… Nah. Tasted like fishy dirt meat. I’ve had bad duck, too.

Feel free to ask questions if you have them. I am no expert, but I am willing to try to help if you get stuck.

1. You are going to find people who have done both. A lot of NAS devices run kind of low powered CPUs so separating it out into two devices can get you more compute power than a single device. For example, an old as the hills file bay may cost next to nothing, and then using your “last” desktop will get you a lot more storage and compute than a 1500$ modern NAS, but it’ll take up more space, cost more in electricity to run, and make more fan noise. This is the route I went. A modern NAS should be able to run what you listed though.
2. TrueNAS scale is all about storage, but it lets you also run containers. Proxmox is all about virtualization, but you can then run a storage solution inside a VM or container. It’s not the kind of thing you’re going to get a right answer for because either way can work. Both are well-documented, capable solutions. I have tried both at times, but I had a lot more experience with Proxmox by the time I deployed TrueNAS, so I stuck with Proxmox and use a TrueNAS box (bare metal) for backups. It really is a matter of preference.
3. If you have a MiniPC and NAS as separate devices, you will want to set up a network share, so you can seed on the MiniPC the copy that’s on the NAS. My seeding, Jellyfin, Plex, etc, all happen in a virtual hard drive mounted in a separate container from the services. Each of the services "see that drive as a network share despite being hosted on the same physical hardware.

I will never be able to get a small engine private pilot license due to fainting, despite it literally never happening unless I’m standing up…

I have LMDE on an old Lenovo Yoga, but it doesn’t disable the keyboard when in tablet mode. It’s on my list of crap I need to fix. Make sure to check that behavior before you go full install.

Some Fedora variants do that too. Not sure which ones.

I have a Tiny connected to a startech dual USB drive dock. The drives get warm, but not deadly hot. Moving big files is a bit slow, but for streaming on Plex and Jellyfin it works fine.

Ninite won’t run in S-Mode, I tried it once. Only Windows Store Apps. (Mint better.)

I didn’t know anything about docker when I set up my NC years ago, so I ran it as a snap on bare metal. Man, it’s gotten so much better! It used to really suck. Like, simple file transfers just didn’t work half the time, so I’d be retrying the same thing over and over… A few years ago, I literally migrated it from bare metal to a VM, but kept the exact same install. I have so much crap on it now, I think I’ll never bother switching it out to docker, just because of the inconvenience. I know the snap version can just run using a local hostname, you just have to set it in trusted domains setting. Might be the same in the docker image?

When you said mechanical friend, I automatically thought of Johnny 5. I think I’m too old to be Internetting right now.

Dogged stubbornness. I use Linux because I refuse to give MS any more of my money, and I’m too stubborn to give up.

I use Gpoddersync to keep my phone and tablet in sync, but I have one podcast that keeps glitching out and redownloading over and over. Not sure why.

I tried it in Lutris and in a VM, neither worked. I never tried it just in Wine. Hmm… Well, I have two weeks left of school, so I don’t know if it’s worth trying anymore.

If you plan on dual booting, remember to disable fast startup on the windows side, or you won’t be able to access the windows partition(s) as read/write in Linux. I have to dual boot for school, (God damn you, Lockdown Browser!) But as soon as I’m done, I’m dropping MS like the hot steaming pile it is.

Be careful with disk destroyer!

I pretty much agree with all of this… I have a Mint XFCE installed on a thumb drive. (Not an installER , installED.) I can boot it on basically any computer that still supports Legacy, and I’ve done so on a Dell Venue Pro tablet (Atom CPU, 2Gb Ram). Had a bastard of a time getting it to boot, but it ran better than the on board Windows 8.1. This was post-Covid. Of all the systems I’ve run it on, one didn’t have WiFi, and one had a bunch of messing around to get the audio to switch between speakers and headphones reliably. But keep in mind, this is the exact same copy of the OS, across a half dozen systems. I’ve also upgraded it over five years or so…

In my IT program at school, the only people who have heard of the fediverse are the ones I’ve told.

Godzilla, Esperanto, tiny phones, vampires, the weird knife Wednesday guy, and way too many silly Linux memes. Homelab, self-host. That’s what Lemmy is to me! I mostly skip the politics, although I do like the odd privacy rant. Also, Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism, by Sara Wynn-Williams. That’s unrelated to anything, but I intend to include it in any comment I make until I read it.

Godzilla Minus One. No, seriously. A Godzilla Movie, but one where the human story and the drama is just as awesome as the monster. A Kaiju film where there’s actual stakes, where you feel what the main characters feel, and where the monster doesn’t seem like a big, far off show and the actors are on a different plane of existence. A Godzilla movie that managed to surprise me three different times. Thankfully, we have Godzilla Minus One.