That seems like a good edit, and fair enough. Good to know that there is also room for people who want to use their computer in a non-fanatical way, simply minding our own business.

I don’t fit in an of these teams, and neither do literally all Linux users I know. Should we have identity crises, or could this be a giant oversimplification?

Which compression level are you using? My old server is able to compress flac’s at the highest (and therefore “slowest”) compression level at >50x speed, so bumping the level up shouldn’t be too hard on your CPU.

I’ve been running some external drives on my server for about a year now. In my experience, hard drives with an external power supply suffer less from random disconnects. The specific PC also makes quite a large difference in reliability. My server is just a regular desktop and has very little problem staying connected and powering my 3 external drives. My seedbox is an old laptop, and has been having almost constant problems with random disconnects and power issues. Maybe test how well your framework does with some external drives before committing to the plan?

To change the ownership of the files, you should only have to run sudo chown -R user:group directory. -R makes chown run recursively, so it will modify the directory and all subdirectories and files. Do note that changing the ownership to plex:plex or something similar would leave your user unable to normally modify the files. My solution to this was to add both my regular user and the plex (in my case jellyfin) user to the same group. That way both users can easily see and modify the files, as long as the group has read/write permissions (the 2nd column of rwx in ls -Al). If necessary, you can add group permissions with sudo chmod -R g+rw directory.

On a side note: have you considered using jellyfin? It’s a completely free alternative to plex, which recently received a truly massive update with tons of new features. Some people prefer plex’ overall experience, but I’ve been running jellyfin with almost no complaints.

Small disclaimer: I’m writing from mobile, so the commands might not be 100% correct. Run at your own risk, and NEVER POINT A CHMOD/CHOWN COMMAND AT SYSTEM DIRECTORIES LIKE / OR /USR. That’s one of the easiest ways to completely break your system.

Have you tried the official guide from the jellyfin website?

As for the guide this AI generated: it bothers me that they instruct you to use chocolatey for the *arrs, but still advice you to install docker, qbittorrent and jellyfin manually (all of which have chocolatey packages). I disagree with the comment that external storage would be recommended, as internal storage is generally more reliable (depending on a lot of factors of course). Also, I believe the “adding a library”-section of the jellyfin setup is a bit too short to be of any use, and would recommend referring to the jellyfin docs instead.

This guide also doesn’t explain how to make jellyfin accessible outside of your LAN. Once again, I’d recommend referring to the jellyfin docs if you want to do this.

I personally have only set up qbittorrent, jellyfin and docker (not the *arr suite), so I can’t comment on the completeness of the guide, but I wouldn’t trust it too much (seeing the previous oversights).

And finally, as someone who started their selfhosted server journey on windows: don’t. There is a reason why almost all guides are written for linux, as it is (in my humble opinion) vastly superior for server usage once you get used to it.