I personally use goharddrive and serverpartdeals on eBay and have had good luck, but I’m always looking for others

Hah well, I just tested the built in graphics and it worked. If you wanna give me more details on what you have I can try to help

Nice, where do you get yours?

Portability/modularity/plus I have an Intel Arc GPU. The drivers just played nicer on Windows when it comes to transcoding (which you said wasn’t an issue.) But most of my services are on separate barebones VMs because they’re just easier to work with.

I went with a “traditional” desktop because I already had a big ass Be Quiet! Dark Base 900 Pro. Also I don’t trust hardware raid, and a regular desktop is infinitely more flexible.

For instance: I threw two GPUs in there! Little one for transcoding, big one for gaming. So I can play a game while my girlfriend watches a movie in the other room. Plus I can keep shoving drives in there until I run of room. A dedicated NAS is much more limited

Hm so are you trying to pass through your onboard graphics?

I’d say so. My buddy is into gaming, but I only have one computer. To get around anti-cheat, I tricked a Windows VM into thinking that it’s running on bare metal. I pass through my GPU to it and I can play on medium quality settings just fine

Oh shit I may have advice. I have a setup similar to what you’re shooting for! Proxmox is the absolute best thing ever. I used to just run plain Debian with some docker and random services. Now I have proxmox, and for my desktop I pass my GPU through to a VM that is my desktop.

I’ve got half a dozen VMs, one of them has the arr stack hooked up to a raid 6 array (7 14 TB drives), and another VM running jellyfin (and I use Kodi to play stuff on my nvidia shield)

First advice of the top of my head, gosuperhard and serverpartsdeals on eBay are amazing. They sell used industry drives for a fraction of the cost, just shoot for the ones that have warranties

Mint is rad. I currently use barebones Debian testing with a bunch of customized stuff, but I always keep a bootable Mint flash drive on my keychain. It’s a very solid choice

Ay fellow Pittsburgh person. Surprisingly good cop experiences here too. Obviously ACAB because fuck the system in general, but twice in the last couple years there were some domestic disturbance calls around here, and the cops deescalated some VERY loud and angry situations. I think it helps that they are smaller groups who tend to live here