The article you’re looking for is in Dragon #62 - The half-orc point of view. There’s a whole series of them and they’re all good reads.

Yeah, I’ve stopped using plex entirely. I was grandfathered in, but it just got to be too much nonsense. The license changes to unRAID don’t meet that bar, IMO. Yeah, the old license model is gone, but “buy once upgrade free forever” is what caused plex to go the route it did. I honestly never expected to get upgrades forever - I assumed that it would have to go one of a few ways for the devs to be able to feed their families, and what they choose is definitely one of the lesser evils. For a lot of use cases, it even makes sense. I stayed on 6.x for probably close to 3 years, so i would have saved money with the new scheme. I’m also willing to admit that if you’re truly dead set on free (both libre and gratis), then there are plenty of solid choices there, too

Yeah, they did something goofy with it, but they’re at least trying to not be nakedly evil. I got in when it was just a perpetual license, but the new model isn’t as bad as a lot of people think. TrueNAS is good too - I use the enterprise version at work and it’s done well. The biggest differences are that the Ent. version doesn’t expose containers or lxc so i don’t know how that works, and TrueNAS/ZFS requires same-size disks where unRAID allows mixing sizes while retaining up to 2 parity disks. At work, I buy specific drives, so zfs is great - at home I buy what’s affordable, so zfs isn’t so good. I also saw one of your other comments, and unRAID supports hardware pass-through to containers, so exposing your AMD iGPU to jellyfin should be pretty simple. I can’t speak to how TNas would handle that

I’ll make the obligatory unRAID suggestion. It fits a lot of less intensive scenarios like what you’re describing. It does carry a cost, and the licensing model is “interesting”, but it has top-tier ease of use, especially around container apps. It would also allow you to use that 1tb ssd as a cache drive since the OS would run from usb (well, in-memory but stored on usb). You can also trial it for free for 30 days and if you don’t like it, there’s plenty of good suggestions in the thread already

Everything is just peachy this week except that I’m still trying to sort out why my I’m unable to access the internet when I’m connected to my unraid wireguard instance.

I am also finally ready to ditch my plex instance, too. Got some self-inflicted permissions issues sorted and it’s been smooth sailing for long enough that I’m ready to make the switch

It’s almost 100% file sharing these days. Something I greatly lament. The entry barrier seems like it’s just too high these days. That could probably be fixed with better client software, but it would also require a willingness for folks to get on board with a “dead” platform. Lemmy growing as much as it has was nutty. I’m not sure that could happen again

Usenet never really went away, it just got quieter in favor of easier to use options. I still use it pretty frequently for the couple of things is really good for.

It’s a gross oversimplification, but think of usenet as a kind of early social media or proto-forums. Before websites, facebook, or anything resembling the modern internet took off, news groups were howl ike-minded people connected. You could post articles to various groups, sort of like a dead drop, and that post would be related around to all of the various providers based on who subscribed to whom. The user interface was very similar to an email client and you could look at it like sending email to a global address (with no user@ part)

The structure of usenet was based on dot syntax, with the topic scope becoming progressively more narrow as you went along. You would have things like: alt.books.scifi

alt.books.scifi.authors

alt.books.scifi.authors.asimov

or comp.software

comp.software.unix

comp.software.unix.compilers

with each of those groups focusing on more specific topics as they went down the hierarchy, and thousands of groups and subgroups.

Usenet was one of the first federated services, too. Due to how replication was managed, no one single server or host controlled it. Your server could go down, but any other server that replicated (federated) with your instance would have all the same articles unless they were marked as a “local only” group.

This is all very early in the internet, but i feel like this is the kind of thing that will save us in the end. Federated services, newsgroups, personal websites, and forums can free us from the shackles of Corp owned platforms. It’s amazing how relevant it still is for a technology spun up in the early 80s. Wikipedia has a great article on usenet that everyone on a fediverse platform should read to help understand how we got here and how quirky and weird and fun the old internet used to be (and hopefully can be again)