Dust is going to be a problem (well, maybe not that much electrically, but it maks it a pita to keep clean) after some months, especially for the Raspberry Pi.

Consider getting (or, even better, 3D printing) an enclosure for it at least (maybe the HDDs will be fine as they are since the fan keeps the air moving and dust probably can’t actually settle down on it).

Most people don’t even boycot companies for doing this shit.

worst deals given to the poorest people, who are least likely to have other options

(emphasys mine)

Financially, giving the higher price to those who have fewer options is exactly “what it should be” so it makes sense that a pattern finding algorithm trained to find patterns in user data that indicate they are likely to agree to higher prices, produces such a result.

It’s Ethically and Morally that this is the very opposite of “what it should be”.

The higher a percentage of your income is the price of something, the more reason there is to allocate time to find the best price - if something costs you an amount which you earn in 5 minutes, it’s not really worth it to spend time looking for the better price, if it costs an amount which you earn in 2 months, it’s definitelly worth to spend at least several hours looking around.

Granted, as you say, many don’t have the time to do this (though often the Maths for literally taking time of work to do it, do add up), and in my experience most people don’t really make the mental connection between an amount they’re considering spending and how long do they have to work to earn it hence don’t really look around enough when it’s financially logical to do it.

That said, for the reason I gave above, the rich don’t really care about things that “just” cost a couple thousand of dollars, which is why they casually just rent a private jet for a trip - there’s a whole industry for that - or even own one and employ a pilot for it fulltime.

That’s not even close to a proper test of Linux womanhood/manhood.

There are Russians who are more tech savvy than you would expect, but in average they’re just like the rest.

One would expect that in Russia, like everywhere, the kind of people hired to manage the IT infrastructure in most companies are not the “hacker elite” (unless the company gets one purely by luck)

The only shocking thing here is that a military manufacturer - which one would expect to try a bit harder to find the kind of systems manager that can harden their internal systems - seems to have not properly hardenned/segregated their systems.

Then again, maybe they’re not totally incompetent and do have their mission critical stuff air-gapped and the damage done by the Ukranian hackers is less impactful than the headline implies. From the outside it’s hard to tell.

Alternativelly, some higher-up got pressure via some politician after talking to some lobbyist or golf-buddy, to “do something”, and some lower-down who got the hot potato covered their ass by finding something they could do, all of which quite independently of any strategical considerations.

If one doesn’t assume the Justice System aims be Just, a lot of things become easilly explained without the needed to find some kind of Master Strategy Beyond Our Comprehension to explain them.

Almost certainly there was some kind of pressure by somebody well connected on some higher up in the Italian Justice or Political Authorities of the

“Something Must Be Done!”

kind.

Followed by whomever was the last link in the shit chain coming from above, following the mental process of:

“This is Something we can do”

“We shall do This!”

It’s pretty standard in the stuff which isn’t their daily bread and butter that Justice Systems are driven by cronyism at the higher level and cover-my-ass at the lower level, especially in countries which have a culture of Cronyism.

(People are people, and even in Justice Systems they’re no more impeccably honest and fair than elsewhere - in fact positions with power tend to attract people who are less honest and fair than average, IMHO).

Often this shit gets overturned when it gets to court or on at least appeal (generally the system gets less crooked as you go up, though I know of cases in other similar countries in Europe were only when it got the European Court Of Human Rights was the injustice corrected) and once the Press’ (and the higher up’s) attention has moved on, but that is a mentally and economically very costly fight for individuals to fight, which is why poor people almost invariably get shafted in such a system when they cross the wrong person or “don’t know their place”.

In the day immediatelly after the US bombing of Iran we had a guy on TV here in Portugal using exactly this kind of argumentation (he used at least 2 or 3 “arguments” which were very much the same as the propaganda for the second Iraq war).

He was from some Think Tank and I looked it up and it that turns out it’s pro-US pro-Israel pro-Nato and basically aligned with the Fascists from before the Revolution who “turned” Democrats.

The various Propaganda outlets set up in Europe by the US for decades probably pass their propaganda cheatsheets around.

Mind you, the guy seemed weirdly unconfortable whilst spewing that shit.

Mint?

Maybe Arch or even Ubuntu?

External 2.5" HDDs connected via USB for longer term bulk storage and using it as a NAS, a smaller internal NVME SSD for the OS and a larger one (but SATA, so slower) for the directory were torrents go to.

The different drive performances fit my usage pattern just fine whilst optimizing price per GB.

External 3.5" would be cheaper for bulk storage but the 2.5" are a leftover from when I was more constrained in terms of physical space.

Well, the N100 does have a lot more breathing space in terms of computing power, so it’s maybe a better bet for something you want to use for a decade or more, and that remote control I linked to above does work fine, except for the power button (which will power your Linux off but won’t power it back on).

I actually tried an Android TV Box (which is really just and SBC in the same range of processing power as the Pi) for this before going for the Mini PC and it was simply not as smooth operating.

That Mini-PC has enough computing power room (plus the right processing extensions) that I can be torrenting over OpenVPN on a 1Gb/s connection whilst watching a video from a local file and it’s not at all noticeable on the video playback.

Kodi install instructions are here

I don’t use docker, I use lubuntu with normal packages. So for example Kodi is just installed from the Team Kodi PPA repository (which, granted, is outdated, but it works fine and I don’t need the latest and greatest) and just set it up to be auto-started when X starts so that on the TV it’s as if Kodi is the interface of that machine.

Qbittorrent is just the server only package (qbittorrent-nox) which I control remotelly via its web interface and the rest is normal stuff like Samba.

After the inital set up, the actual linux management can be done remotelly via ssh.

That said, LibreELEC is a Linux distro which comes with Kodi built-in (it’s basically Kodi and just enough Linux to run it), so assuming it’s possible to install more stuff in it might be better - I only found out about it when I had my setup running so never got around to try it. LibreELEC can even work in weaker hardware such as a Raspberry Pi or some of its clones.

Also you can get Kodi as a Flatpak which works out of the box in various Linux distros so if you need the latest and greatest Kodi plus a full-blown Linux distro for other stuff you might do the choice of distro based on supporting flatpack and being reasonably lightweight (I actually originally went for Lubuntu exactly because it uses a lightweight Window Manager and I expected that N100 mini-pc to need it, though in practice the hardward can probably run a lot more heavy stuff than that, though lighter stuff means the CPU load seldom goes up significativelly hence the fan seldom turns on and so the thing is quiet most of the time and you only hear the fan spinning up and then down again once in a while even in the Summer).

As for docker, there are a lot of instructions out there on how to install Kodi with Dockers, but I never tried it.

Also you might want to get a remote like this, which is a wireless remote with a USB adapter, not because of the air-mouse thing (frankly, I never use it) but simply because the buttons are mapped to exactly the shortcuts that Kodi uses, so using it with Kodi in Linux is just like using a dedicated remote for a TV Media Box - in fact all those thinks are keyboard shortcuts (that remote just sends keypresses to the PC when you press a button) and they keyboard shortcuts for media players seem to be a standard.

It really depends on what you’re doing with it and on what old PCs you have available.

I have an N100 Mini-PC at home in my living room connected to my TV which is both a home server and a TV-Box using Kodi (I even have a remote for it).

Having modern image and video decoding in hardware is pretty useful when I’m using it as a TV Box (there is zero stutter with it), whilst the rest of the time the thing mostly sits doing some low CPU-intensive server tasks (mainly torrenting and SMB server stuff).

Also, it’s a small box that fits fine on my TV stand without standing out and runs silent pretty almost all of the time.

Further, I don’t have any low power consuming old PCs around - the best are some chunky old notebooks, the rest are old gaming PCs which eat more power idle than the mini PC does at full load - and even the notebooks aren’t that low power as all that.

Mind you, for many years I used an old Asus EEE PC (a very small notebook running Linux) as home file server (with external HDs) and had a separated dedicated hardware TV Media Server box playing files from it, but eventually that PC stopped working and I found out I could just use my Router as a file server.

Last but not least, judging for how long I kept using my TV Media Server boxes (which over almost 2 decades I had 2 different ones and which as dedicated hardware could not easilly be upgraded when new video compression standards came out) 10+ years is definitelly my time-frame for using that Mini-PC.

All this to say that you should consider using old hardware, especially if you have some around and it’s task appropriate (like I did before using an old Asus EEE PC as a home file server), but also take in account what you’re going to do it and consider if new hardware won’t be better over the timespan you will likely be using it and if the being able to get a more task appropriate form factor (like how having a little box-size Mini PC lets me have it in my living room on a TV stand next to my TV and my fiber router) is worth it.

In summary, before you get hardware you should ponder a bit about what you intend to do with it before you decide what to get, don’t be afraid of using stuff you already have and also don’t be afraid to get new stuff if it’s actually justified by hardnosed reasons rather than merely some variant of the “new stuff smell” psychological effect when buying new.

Well, been * ahem * told that a friend of a friend didn’t found any videos there were “Your friendly neighborhood geek goes into the house of a hot milf to upgrade her Windows 10 machine to Arch and she shows them how hot she found their Linux install skills and how thankful she is”, so that seems unlikely.

So what you’re saying is that there are more wankers on Linux nowadays!???

If you’re purelly seeding (as in starting to seed a torrent from scratch never having downloaded it from the bittorrent client you’re using or having done it a long time ago - days, weeks or longer), without port-forwarding it will simply not work and nobody can connect to your machine and downloade anything for that torrent because all those remote machines that are trying to connect to your client have no association with your machine on the Mullvad Router doing NAT translation.

If you’re downloading a torrent and then leave it seeding for a while after the download phase is over, then it will usually work fine because the Mullvad Router doing NAT Translation still remembers the various remote machines that your machine connected to in the swarm for that torrent during the download stage, hence when those remote machines connect back trying to themselves download stuff from yours, it will know that’s related your machine and thus accept those remote connection and forward them to your machine.

In practice this means that it if you leave your torrents seeding AFTER DOWNLOADING is over, usually (but not always as for torrents with very few peers the swarm is either too small or changes too fast) you can upload more than you downloaded, hence you’re not leeching.

So if you use Mullvad and don’t want to be a leecher, always leave your torrents active and uploading after you’ve downloaded them.

Personally I have mine set to 1.5 upload to download ratio and only seldom does it fail to reach it.

I don’t think your explanation of why it seems to work is correct.

I seems to work (works in a limited way, even), because any remote machines that your bittorrent client connected to during downloading are temporarilly recorded on the Mullvad router on the other side of your VPN doing NAT translation as associated with your machine, so when those remote machines connect to that router to reach your machine, it knows from that recorded association that those connections should be forwarded to your machine.

This is quite independent of people on the other side using port-forwarding or not.

Port-forwarding on the other hand is a static association between a port in that router and your machine, so that anything hitting that specific port of the router gets forwarded the port in your machine you specified (hence the name “port” “forwarding”). With port-forwarding there is no need for there having been an earlier connection from your machine to that remote machine to allow “call back”.

This is why at the end of downloading a torrent behind a Mullvad VPN will keep on uploading but if one restarts a torrent which was stopped hours or days ago (i.e. purelly seeds), it never uploads anything to anybody - in the first case that NAT translation router associated all machines your client connected to during download to your machine, so when they connect back to download stuff from you it correctly forwards those connections to your machine, but in the second case it’s just getting connections from unknown remote machines hitting one of its ports and in the absence of a “port-forwarding” static rule or a record of your machine having connected to those remote machines, it doesn’t know which of the machines behind it is the one that should receive those connection so nothing gets forwarded.

So it’s perfectly possible to share back when behind a Mullvad VPN but you have to leave the torrent client keep on seeding immediatly after downloading and it will only ever upload to machines which were in the swarm when the client was downloading (they need not have been clients it downloaded from, merelly clients it connected to, for example to check their availability of blocks to download, which give how bittorrent works normally means pretty much the whole swarm)

It is however not at all possible to just start seeding a torrent previously downloaded unless the download wasn’t that long ago (how long is “too long” depends on how long the NAT Translation Router of Mullvad keeps those recorded associations I mentioned above, since those things are temporary and get automatically cleaned if not used),

I think the point is that they can’t easilly track back to a specific client of a specific ISP instances of unlicensed downloading of copyrighted materials if they’re done behind a VPN.

Mind you, they can still easilly track it back to the VPN, so make sure you’re using a provider that puts privacy above all an is not based in countries like the US or UK.

That said, if they just throw an unsupported accusation at you and the ISP cuts you out, using a VPN or not makes no difference.

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