I have a lifetime plex pass so this does not really affect me but I expect the trend of degrading experience to continue. I would have switched to Jellyfin a long time ago but I am dreading contacting everyone I share with and getting them migrated.

I have a minio instance that I use to distribute files

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None currently. Wish I could afford a GPU to play with some stuff.

I don’t have any insight into the hardware you mentioned but I wanted to say that I put opnsense onto a low powered computer a few years ago and love it. It is extremely configurable and easy to use with some pretty good documentation out there.