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 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.

Nite 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?

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 got an N100 SZBox for cheap a few years ago(?) That has a big USB HDD drive plugged into it. Handles 1080p in house just fine, and I think the bloody hard drive eats more power than it does!

That article had 891 “partners”. Holy hell.

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…

If you try to ping 8.8.8.8 and it works, then try to ping google.com. if that doesn’t work, it’s your DNS resolver. I’m not an arch user, but on a lot of Linuxes, there’s a nameserver setting somewhere that has come unset. Try to set it to the IP address of your home router, that may fix it. P.S. The guy who posted the “It’s always DNS” shirt is right. I am buying that shirt.

I’ve run yacy and searxng, and I find yacy flaky. I get really random search results, often not useful at all. I like Searxng though, although once in a while I have to hit refresh to get my result. Probably a simple fix, I’ve just never bothered to go down the rabbit hole.

I have a Mode 7 Retro ii from Japan. The number pad? Useless. But it folds up and fits in my pocket, and is good enough. (Writing this on my tablet, so…)

I tried to start with OpenStack. Oof. Yup. Proxmox.

There are a lot of good guides. I run almost everything on proxmox these days, even virtualized my Windows, and (after a lot of messing around) got my GPU passed through for when I game.

No! You shouldn’t have told me that it could be done! Now, the next time I launch gparted, I’ll somehow manage to wipe everything! Not just my system, but, like, all my systems! If it can be broken on a computer, I’ll be the one to break it!

Everyone is going to tell you to use dd. dd if=/dev/oldsdcard of=/dev/newsdcard

Personally, I have actually eaten an entire system by getting the wrong /dev names for the input file and the output file.

Gparted lets you copy whole partitions and resize them, and is graphical. I have yet to destroy my computer using gparted, but I’ve definitely done so with dd. (I’m also an idiot though, so…) Edit: gparted will also let you resize the new SD to the bigger partition size! However, it is actually possible to break your system in gparted too, so make sure you aren’t deleting partitions and stuff in there.