It requires a bit more effort but Soulseek has been around for years. I build my own music library from P2P or buying on Bandcamp. It all goes on my NAS and I stream it via Plexamp. I have my own library, my fiance’s, a few friend’s on there. I’m pushing 10k albums at this point.

I know I used to have an adblocked version of Spotify on my phone for convenience sake but I think they finally caught on and killed that. The AUR version still works for me however. I haven’t had a Spotify subscription since probably like 2018.

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Sure

I built it out of old PC parts when I upgraded my desktop. I wanted to go full AMD for both the CPU and GPU for the new build so I used the old mobo and got an Intel i3-10100 open box along with a few other random parts like a small nvme drive for a cache drive. I got four 8TB drives to start from a few places, one of them being Mac bid.

Then I found an absolutely massive heavy duty 48u server rack on Craigslist for like 50 bucks. I cut it in half with an angle grinder so it would fit under the steps and gave the other half to my fiance for his music production gear in our studio. I took din rail home from work and drilled & tapped holes in the rack to support it since the top frame was now missing. I put some din rail on the sides to mount my old NUCs and ran game servers on them for a while.

I have a rack mounted UPS on the bottom, the NAS above it in a rosewill case that can take up to like 16 spinning drives I think. I have a 10gb/s fiber connection for loading steam games as fast as the disk can spin. Games really don’t have many loading screens nowadays so it works great for storing smaller games that load you in once or twice. The real complicated massive games I still store on my NVME on my desktop.

On top I have my networking equipment. Eventually I’m going to get a full router and NVR with cameras to watch things like birds and the front entrance. I also have a pi-hole.

I have a KVM setup that easily lets me navigate my desktop from the living room and play games in there. It works great. I mounted a remote start button on my living room wall, so now I can turn my PC on, login, press a keybind in hyprland that runs a script I wrote. This will turn off both PC monitors, change sound over, and launch emulationstation-DE which is a front end for all of the emulators, steam games, pirated games, whatever. So now the desktop is doing all the heavy lifting in terms of its CPU/GPU for the game, storing the game on my NAS in the basement, and broadcasting it in 4K / 60 FPS in my living room while I use a controller with zero latency. All on Linux. If 15 year old me who was using Ubuntu could see my setup now he’d geek out. A side note is I love Arch Linux now, and never want to use anything else. But it took me a while to find my way.

This turned into a bit of a tangent about my homelab as a whole, but the OS for the NAS I use is unRAID. The flexibility is unparalleled. You can throw whatever random drives you find in it and they’re protected so long as they’re the same size or smaller than the parity drive. On the NAS itself I run an *arr stack, Plex, a torrent client, etc. I also use it to download YT videos and have a private collection of things like concerts. Quite a few people use my Plex. My parents are even on it now and they’re getting into their 70s.

Really though, the NAS is primarily storage first and foremost. But it’s been chugging along for years and is pretty crucial in doing a lot.

I learned a ton about Linux building a few servers. A simple NAS can be a great starting point.

I have my NAS mounted as an NFS format. Since I use Linux on my desktop and server, the storage pool integrates seamlessly into things like my file browser and terminal. And don’t underestimate having “basically unlimited” storage capabilities. I have thousands of old games stored on my NAS, I play them via emulators or on steam.

This may not be the answer you’re looking for but Plex finally added the feature to set subtitles to be on if the audio is not in English. Previously you had to turn subtitles on for every episode individually, couldn’t even do it per show.

Are you sure you set your qbittorrent up correctly? You need to bind your network interface so it only works when connected to your VPN. It’s possible it started using your regular network if your VPN went down or maybe even if it was a higher speed, I’m not sure.

I know for mine, I noticed a couple times that all my torrents stopped seeding. I pay for mullvad annually so sometimes I forget when I need to resubscribe. But it’s a good piece of mind that if my VPN isn’t active, qbittorrent won’t seed or leech a single thing.

Try disabling your VPN on that device and see if you can still download Linux ISOs.

A few suggestions:

Going from a 4 bay to a 6 bay is not that big of a jump. Especially if you are already at 95% full, you’re gonna fill up those other two drives quick. I used to have a 4 bay little off-brand NAS I found on eBay. I sold it and upgraded to a 14 bay rosewill 4U rack-mounted chassis. For parts I just repurposed some old PC parts and bought a few open box ones. The chassis is like $139 but I suggest getting better rails as the rosewill ones can be kinda crappy. You’d be amazed how quickly storage can fill up and accumulate, so plan for the future.

I also glanced at the NAS you listed, and it’s $1000. You can build something way more customizable with way more storage capabilities for like 1/3 of the cost of that. Was there a reason you wanted to go with this one? Generally it seems to be selling the software that comes with it, and “AI” which… I’m not sure what the idea of that is with it being a data storage device.

Which brings me to my next point, I would highly suggest unRAID for an operating system. Reason being is you said that the idea of constantly adding to your pool and being flexible with sizes and different types of drives appeals to you. This is unRAID’s bread and butter. Throw one large drive in there as your parity, and whatever other random drives you want (different sizes, brands, whatever) are your pool and they are all protected in case of a failure.

It may be controversial in a FOSS sense, but unRAID does have a one-time license fee. I paid like $80 four years ago. Worth it for how easy and configurable the software is, but it’s still Linux at its core so if you want to get your hands dirty all it takes is one click and you’re in the shell or spinning up VM’s and of course docker for your “core” software. Just don’t overspend on a crazy M.2 SSD for your cache disk or a high capacity one. I promise you don’t need the best one to load Plex thumbnails .001 seconds faster. Whether this is better than the prepackaged Zima OS is up to you.

Yeah. I work for a company that builds the electrical systems for cooling Amazon’s AWS servers in data centers and we are trying to keep up with orders as best we can. They just want more more more, so much that we’re storing them in another warehouse because we don’t have the room here.

They’re projecting orders all the way into 2035 currently.

Ahh my context is all related to industrial electrical systems. It gets really fun when UL and NFPA 79 start to conflict with each other.

Pretty wild seeing an ad for UL out in the wild in these comments, you an electrician?

I got my MTR in UL 508A a couple years ago

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Trump lifting sanctions on Syria might be the best thing he’s ever done

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There are a ton of great things in this, wow

Pittsburgh PA

Even if I could afford one, or want one, which I don’t for many reasons, the vehicle is so ginormous that it would be the biggest pain in the ass in the world to drive around my city. Parallel parking? Forget it. Narrow side streets that are the width of a car, but somehow you need to let someone come down directly towards you and it’s not a one way? Bumpy roads full of potholes or worn down to the original brick roads, with the vehicle that’s tires wear out faster than any other due to the sheer weight?

I think you get the idea

Yeah qbittorrent really locks this down and makes it fool-proof quite easily.

I noticed that none of my anime torrents were downloading last week. I was like hmm did my VPN get IP banned? Then I tried a private tracker. Last ditch effort was the Arch Linux iso.

I forgot to pay my VPN for the year. As soon as I did, restarted the container, boom back to business as usual

I guess I should clarify that it’s mechanically the same operating system for over 20 years.

Keybinds on tiling window managers was such a game changer of how I daily use my operating system that now I never want to go back to the traditional method.

And yes there’s a fresh coat on things like file explorer or various programs but win11 compared to win10 is basically the same thing with no innovation, just more ads, telemetry, spyware, etc.

We still have windows 7 PCs in the shop at work and it looks the same to me as my work windows 11 laptop.

I’m sure I’m preaching to the choir on the fediverse haha

What even is this comment lol

Fedora is a distro, not a desktop environment. Your desktop environment is going to dramatically change your look and feel of your OS.

I don’t know how anyone can say windows 11 with all its ads and basically the same UI as windows XP from 2000 “looks better” than something like hyprland, i3, KDE, or gnome.

Metube docker image worked pretty great for me as a downloader