I run such games on Linux now, mostly with wine/proton. There is some risk, sure, but I’d largely say that system is still secure. If something comes by and wipes out the system, I have snapshots of anything important, including root and home. If those are gone, I have versioned backups offsite and maybe offline. I don’t expect to receive any malware targeting my somewhat esoteric software choices from windows games, so I feel okay logging into a secure sevice, for example, but I may have to adjust this in the future.

With regards to smartphones, I think there are so many holes that it’s not much more secure, if any, than a paranoid desktop setup. From time to time I have installed random APKs and had extreme anxiety each time. I am massively more paranoid about my phone as I don’t have real control over what’s running on it. Hoping for more competitive open source solutions in the future.

Generally speaking, opening non-executable files is fine. There are and have been specific exploits which allow arbitrary code execution, but it’s dependent on the application/library loading them. The bigger danger is files disguised as other things. This is especially bad on Windows as it likes to hide that information from users, or just execute random embedded vbscripts, or whatever. Also see the recent whatsapp mimetype bug/exploit. Certain things pose more of a risk than others. PDFs (thanks adobe) can embed arbitrary javascript which is meant to be executed. Same as web pages, of course, but browsers have a lot more attention to sandboxing.

Edit: I don’t really run cracked software anymore, but I have VMs ready to go if need be. Would recommend others do the same.

I know you said consumer GPU, but I run a used Tesla P40. It has 24 GB of vram. The price has gone up since I got it a couple years ago, there might be better options in the same price category. Still, it’s going to be cheaper than a modern full fat consumer gpu, with a reasonable performance hit.

My use case is text generation, chat kind of things. In most cases, the inference is more than fast enough, but it can get slow when swapping out large context lengths.

Mostly I run quantized 8-20B models with the sweet spot being around 12. For specialized use cases outside of general language, you can run more compact models. The general output is quite good, and I would have never had thought it was possible 10 years ago.

ETA: I paid about $200 USD for the P40 a couple years ago, plus the price for a fan and 3d printed shroud.

CRF 18 is usually where I start at, but that is focusing on quality. I’d imagine you would want a higher starting point.

If you want to find out what different options are or do, the docs are a good place to start: https://x265.readthedocs.io/en/master/cli.html

In my opinion the ideal x265 size/speed/quality is using a tuned slow preset, perhaps with filtering if the source is grainy. A test encode or few should be done to determine an ideal CRF per source.

Since you don’t seem very familiar with x265, I would just stick with the defaults in slow preset, but consider using aq-mode 3 or 5 (only available in the patman mod). You can also adjust the aq-strength to help control the resulting size somewhat, I wouldn’t go lower than 0.5.

Yeah, I remember someone getting all their Proton accounts banned, but they had a large amount, basically using it as a disposable provider. Don’t be that person and ruin it for everyone.

I have two with Proton and have had two with Tuta. I don’t think either would bother coming down on that. It could very easily be two people sharing a device with different email accounts or so forth.

Yeah, you can turn off registration without a token. Then, if you want someone to register you can issue them a registration token, or manually create their account.

Federation can be turned on, on a case by case basis.

You can set rooms to invite only and not discoverable. Alternately, you can use an invite-only space that allows users to join rooms from there.

The first two parts are done in the server config, see the synapse docs. The last is done once the server is setup and running as an admin.

It is, but doesn’t really play well with PTs in general. Not all trackers support it (some of the software is that old), and even when it works I’ve run into unexpected issues.

I would like it if there was increased adoption.

I don’t know of any private trackers who are interested in users in your particular circumstances. The reality is, you can’t really seed behind CGNAT. I would really consider shelling out for a VPN, you can get an okay one for 5-10 euro a month. If you’re technically inclined, you could even set your own up on a cheap VPS for less, given you don’t need fast networking.

If you have more experience with Linux CLI over powershell, I’d go with that. There are a few options: WSL2, MSYS2, Cygwin.

Whether you like it or not, that’s more or less what happens. You can/will lose a bunch of accounts for causing trouble. Sometimes I think it’s a bit over the top. Instead of keeping out toxic or non-contributing folks it becomes a personal vendetta or innocent violation.

Overall, I’m a fan of banning known bad users, but restraint should be used and collected personal information should be minimized.

I would approach it this way:

1. Learn to configure and install Jellyfin the way you like it. You sound like you have a good start on that. JF handles metadata for you, and you can also manually match items if/when it matches up. The only extra plugins I install are some of the ones for extra metadata providers and TMDB box sets.
2. Setup Jackett with the qB search so you can run manual searches for stuff against your indexers.
3. If you want to use docker, learn docker. There’s a million tutorials around. You can use Docker Desktop on Windows if you want a GUI to help you out. Since docker on Windows runs on WSL2, it’s a good opportunity to mess around with Linux if you aren’t familiar.

From there you can work your way up to full automation and such if you like. I don’t think it’s necessary for most people.

As for data layout, just make some folders like movies, tv, music, etc, and lay out stuff in there logically. If you have a fancy storage setup, you might do separate shares for them, whatever works for you. Some people like to link from their “download” folder into their actual media folder to keep things clean. You can do hard and soft links on Windows with NTFS, but it’s kind of a pain.

I think what you have is fine, and wouldn’t worry about it too much.

That said, I run unbound with pi-hole, directing the dns queries through a wireguard tunnel. It’s a bit slower, but I do like having my own recursive DNS, especially with news that more and more services are implementing DNS level blocking.

Does this work? https://support.tixati.com/settings - import export

I assume you’d need to either try and unravel the export to correct the paths or do it after the fact.

Not a solution to your problem, but just wanted to let you know you can run multiple instances of qB side-by-side. Make a new profile directory and use the option --profile=<new-profile-dir>.

Overall, it’s good, but you need to know what exactly you’re signing up for. The reality is that you can run a decentralized or centralized E2EE chat server, along with voice/video calling, without much effort. There are hiccups with the key exchange that suck, and metadata isn’t really protected. It really comes down to if it meets your particular requirements.

Previously I ran Win 10 IoT LTSC, with a bunch of scripts from https://privacy.sexy/

I believe most things will work about the same in Win 11. Be sure not to disable anything you might actually need as it can be hard to diagnose.

I’ve used Ansible to deploy docker compose and it worked pretty well. You will have to do some learning if you aren’t familiar with it, but I’d say it’s worth it.

Like others, I would not recommend Jenkins.

Running any binary that you can’t examine the source of (and confirm it was built from it without modification) is risky. It’s mostly a balance of trust and risk. Even developers have been known to insert what we could malware.

That said, if you get your cracked content from a trusted source, I’d say it’s generally safe. Otherwise, exercise extreme caution.

Is GMG an official reseller? Maybe I am out of the loop, but I thought they operated in the grey market.

Been with https://www.seedhost.eu/ for a while. They’re very competitive and everything works as you would expect.