I’ve had the opposite experience. It all “just worked”. Try running unraid. It makes a lot of it so much easier.

Time to go to usenet.

Yeah that’s also true. But I switched to proton specifically to have LESS work managing automatic email aliases that are tied to instantly creatable passwords/accounts. I might look into bitwarden with their alias service integration. But I’m not looking forward to another transfer of all of my stuff. For this very specific set of features, really all I can see is bitwarden or proton, and I really hope bitwarden is as seamless and easy as proton because I do not have the mental energy to fiddle with it all the time.

Wow, that’s so many different services to splinter one Proton account into. I was thinking about it too, but that sounds exhausting.

I use frugal usenet and usenet express for my providers. (for redundancy and speed, you only need one really.)

I use nzbgeek for search.

Both providers mostly saturate my 2.5gbps download speed, and when they don’t, my download automatically uses both of them at once anyway so I always saturate. (I limit speeds during the day so I don’t notice any network lag if an automatic download starts while I’m doing stuff.) I can’t recommend one over the other, they both perform great.

I use sabnzbd to actually download stuff, then the arr stack to trigger and control it.

Sabnzbd did require some extra configuration to saturate my bandwidth, so if you do run into any issues DM me and I can help.

All of this lets me download my publicly available and free Linux ISOs very quickly. Even the biggest ones download in a couple minutes. I still use torrents as a backup, as some stuff makes it to torrents before usenet, but I have usenet set as a higher priority. Both are searched automatically so I don’t miss anything.

I remember when graphics cards were for, you know, graphics.

Anyway, go team red.

Yes yes yes. Ever since I set up my arr stack on my home server, I’ve been blown away by just how easy getting everything I want in minutes is. It’s all automated. It’s actually insane.

I never didn’t own that I was a pirate. That’s not in question here. What’s in question is that the reason I am a pirate is I was tired of paying for and dealing with all of those streaming services, and the believability of having so many streaming services. Just because you don’t see the need doesn’t mean other people don’t.

And you are right, it is excessive. Several hundred dollars per month excessive. But that’s what a large portion of people do. Most people don’t know how to pirate.

Like you said, folks pirate because it is easy. Easier than the alternative. When Netflix was easier than piracy and it was the only streaming service around, I didn’t pirate (except anime but that’s another thing entirely). And when steam came onto the scene, piracy plummeted as well. When companies offer truly convenient options, piracy goes down. That’s not justification, that’s the reason.

Netflix, HBO max, Hulu, peacock, YouTube TV, crunchyroll, Amazon prime video, Disney plus, apple TV plus, paramount plus.

I have had all of those and a couple more. Personally, I’ve only had up to 8 at once, but if you’re asking that other person to prove it, it’s not outside the realm of likelihood.

All of those have exclusives. (especially for sports these days. I have to have 3 services just for football, I’m sure there’s ESPN plus or some shit for people really into sports) Needing all of those just to watch the handful of exclusives you want isn’t uncommon.

Login in this scenario means access. I. E. having 10 different apps and searching through all of them for one show.

Play star citizen. You’ll use that up fast.

I fear I might not have results soon. I am going to stick around until Pop Cosmic comes, and then switch to bazzite or tumbleweed if it doesn’t tickle me pink. I am going to install a couple on a 2nd drive, but won’t be using them as my daily driver until cosmic.

Yeah I actually know about that. Pop’s whole shtick of versatile tiling and workspace management doesn’t really benefit me at all, and I reckon the new DE will heavily feature that as well. That’s not necessarily a downside, but it doesn’t really make me want to use it over anything else either. What I do know is that KDE is great, I love using it, I love using its apps, and many of its apps don’t work quite right on POP as it is.

However, I AM interested in Cosmic’s support of nvidia hardware, variable refresh rate, and support for obscure nonsensical monitor setups (which I have haha). So I think I’m going to give it a try, and hope it isn’t worse than gnome. I’m not particularly a fan of gnome, but it does have some cool plugins and wide support.

From what I can tell, nothing is better about the KDE implementation than other KDE distros, but it does check most of the boxes for me. Rolling (ish) release, supports plasma put of the box, not too much work to set up. Kubuntu isn’t as frequently updated which is the main downside for me.

Thank you. I’m definitely doing to trial bazzite and tumbleweed. Both have received near unanimous praise from anyone who mentioned them in my 2 posts, Tumbleweed moreso.

Thank you so much, that was very informative. Tumbleweed is looking more attractive the more I think about it. Or bazzite. I’m going to trial run both of those plus Endeavor OS.

At the very least I want any Ubuntu derivitive to be as good as pop OS, which means no snap and mildly acceptable package maintenance, so that rules out a few options. Pop OS does seem to be one of the best Ubuntu based distros for Nvidia support, and already checks a lot of my boxes so I may even make the decision to stay on this until I can build a red team PC for much easier hardware support (which I already planned on doing eventually).

Thanks! And yeah I’ll definitely try several. I have 2 or 3 that I’m definitely going to test drive for a week thanks to all of the helpful comments I’m getting.

Thanks for the review. Like you said, hardware may or may not be a concern. I built this pc years ago with windows in mind and I plan to build one again at some point. With people praising the non-Debian distros in my list, I might just go that route and see how it goes.

Good to know. Pop OS doesn’t have anything like that as far as I know, and that would be nice to have.

Well KDE was more important to me than rolling releases, plus they were Debian based which I liked. I have heard good things about bazzite, I’ll have to check it out. Tumbleweed was my first choice for a non-Debian distro in that list, so I’m glad you’re confirming my hunch that it would be great for KDE. I’m okay with ditching Debian-based if it means a better experience in the end.