I’ll try to keep a long story short. Basically, I wanted to set up the *arrs to be my automated downloaders with Qbittorrent, with NordVPN.i access my machines via a Cloudflare tunnel I spent way too long figuring out how to configure manually. Somewhere along the line I picked up a Usenet subscription. OG machine was a refurb M715q Lenovo Thinkcentre with an AMD A10-8770e I think. 16gb ram.

Well, I started on Docker Desktop for Windows. I bet you all can imagine how that turned out. Had lots of difficulties, as I was a docker noob. I then made a Linux VM, Ubuntu Server, and ran the straight up Docker Daemon from there. I learned a shit ton about docker. My issue became the VM kept having strange issues, my services were fine, but I would randomly lose network connectivity on the VM, among other things. I have heard how stable Linux is, so I hope it was just the fact it was a VM on an older PC which didn’t have a lot of extra horsepower. So I decided to move all of the services back to Windows, after figuring out almost everything I wanted at this point (the *arrs) were natively supported in Windows, and I still had my Qbit & Nord on windows the entire time as I couldn’t get any of the docker images for torrents+VPN working stably, or it would cause some network issues I couldn’t figure out.

I finally had it set up 90% perfectly. I no longer could use torrents because if I connect to Nord no matter how much I split tunnel, it either causes my cloudflare tunnel to stop working or connectivity between the containers and the Windows host, part of the reason I switched back to Windows. It was running flawless for days on pure Usenet. The only hurdle was Overseerr isn’t supported natively on Windows, and the old AMD CPU would get to 70+% usage on a single transcode. And I had been down the docker road before. Now I am confident in my docker skills, but afraid it will use too many resources as the PC bogs down quite a bit when I’m RDPing into it (seems to work fine when I’m not making it render graphics, because unless I’m RDPing into it, it’s headless.)

So I ended up having a bright idea to buy a Beelink EQ12 after seeing some people online rave about how great it is at Plex transcodes, and separate my download station and my media serving station. So I’m about to overwrite my Windows 10 pro with some flavor of Linux, to run the docker containers I refuse to run on Windows OR a VM. Now I’m just trying to figure out what the best OS would be to maintain compatibility with Windows. I had it set up on the VM that my external hdd Windows path was mounted into Linux, so I didn’t really have to worry about filesystems and such as it directly downloaded to Windows through Linux.

Sorry I’m a bit all over the place, two months of my life condensed into a few paragraphs and I left a shit ton out. I was thinking of trying Ubuntu Server again because I’m familiar with it, but I’ve seen a lot of people suggest OpenMediaVault, TrueNAS, CoreOS, etc. What do you think I should do? I feel like I’m in a tougher position now than I was before even though I have more horsepower to work with lmao.