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 So for example Kodi is just installed from the Team Kodi PPA repository (which, granted, is outdated, but it works fine and I don’t need the latest and greatest) and just set it up to be auto-started when X starts so that on the TV it’s as if Kodi is the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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Only if you believe the racist idea that a nation, any nation, can represent everybody who is part of an ethnicity, i.e. and specifically in this case, that Mathematically the group “Jewish People” and the group “Israel and its supporters” are exactly the same group.

If however the group “Israel and it’s supporters” is but a subset of the group “Jewish People”, then the actions of the subset of the larger group do not justify punishing the wider group, same as, say, the actions of the Ku-Klux-Klan do not justify punishing everbody who is deemed White or the actions of ISIS do not justify punishing everybody who is Muslim.

I think the idea that the actions or victimization of some who are part of a broader group defined by nothing else than the ethnicity they were born into justifies a different treatment of everybody of the broader ethnic group, is THE most common racist trope there is, to the point that even liberals defend that shit (whilst, with zero irony or self awareness, calling it “positive”).

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All those liberals going along with the idea that it’s possible to discriminate in a positive way only have themselves to blame when it turned out that their “positive” support of those they perceive as representatives of an ethnicity whom they (the liberals) view as “victims” as whole (i.e. all individuals of that ethnicity, rather than just the actual victims) was just racist prejudice and discrimination and stupidly easy to abuse to support ethnic cleansing (as long as those doing the murdering are from a “victim” race).

Support for any kind of ethnic-wide assumptions about people and different standards of judgement and actions towards them based on their ethnicity, is the very same kind of view of one’s fellow human beings as the Nazis had, just with different “good” races and “bad” races.

People should be judged on and treated based on what they support and what they do, not the ethnicity they were born into.

This kind of shit is a carbon copy of how the Nazis used claims of people being “against the Aryan race” to deflect criticism of the actions of the Nazis.

I think this is religion being weaponized to support the extreme depravity of an ethno-Fascist ideology, rather than an inherent drive in that religion.

In other words, the problem with Religions is not them having an inherent tendency for this kind of thing, is that they are extremely easy to capture and use to support even the most depraved behaviours, being capable of excusing actions well beyond what most other prepackaged belief systems are able to successfully excuse.

In summary, I don’t think Religion is a driver of this kind of shit, I think it’s an enabler.

The greatest antisemitism there is, is trying to link the most depraved nation state of the XXI century (so far) and its actions, to all Jewish People, both by its implying that any actions commited by that nation state no matter how depraved and violent are How Jews Behave, and because such “representation by a nation state” would only be possible if “all Jews are the same”, both things which are extreme racist takes.

Holocaust admission AND Holocaust denial have now both been deemed antisemitic by the ethno-Fascist nation state that claims to represent all Jewish People.

I had the exact same experience: been doing Linux since the 90s, both for fun and professionaly - the latter mainly in pure server configurations - finaly got around to moving my home PC (which is mainly for gaming) to Linux (using Pop!OS, since I have a Nvidia graphics card and it just supports it out of the box) and it just worked.

Only problem I have with it is that on startup of X I usually get a blank screen and have to switch my monitor OFF and back ON again.

Oh, and startup times are a fraction of Windows startup times (my Windows 10 work machine literally takes longer to wake up from hybernation than my home Linux PC takes to cold boot, and they have equivalent SSDs.

I think I got more hassle with Windows than I do with Linux.

That’s a perfect example of a typical interaction between a Technology Management Consultant and somebody from a STEM area.

Techies with an Engineering background who are in Tech and Tech-adjacent companies are often in the receiving end of similar techno-bollocks which makes no sense from such “Technology” Management Consultants, but it’s seldom quite as public as this one.

Funnily, sometimes the pirate version of a game works whilst the official one does not…

Avoiding the shit from enshittification isn’t hardcore, it’s just the normal adult thing to do.