Thank you for offering! If we make an effort to pull those around us out from under these monolithic, predatory companies, we will be doing our part to make the world a better place

I agree that Stremio is probably best for less tech-savvy users, but I prefer recommending open source over proprietary, free over paid subscriptions, and self-hosted over relying on some company to remain in service. I also prefer having local copies of my media so that I don’t lose anything to no seeders on old media. Of course, there still is a cost component for me, I have to buy hard drives and maintain the server myself.

However, I just want people to move off of streaming services, so if you can help others with a streamio + real debrid setup, please do!

Sure. If you are comfortable with computers, this should be a breeze. I currently use Docker as my server platform, which can run on top of any OS you want, but I run it on debian. I run a Gluetun container + Mullvad for VPN, qBittorrent as the torrent client, Jellyfin for media, Jellyseerr for user requests, Sonarr for TV management, Radarr for movie management, and Prowlarr for torrent indexers. All of these run on separate docker containers. There’s some trickiness for getting all the sketchy traffic going through the VPN, but there are plenty of guides out there, and in DMs I’m willing to offer support, albiet pretty slowly. If you have used Plex in the past, you can replace Jellyfin + Jellyseerr with Plex + Overseerr and the rest of the system can stay the same (although plex has been making some weird moves lately, and isn’t free or open source, so I’d stick with Jellyfin if you can get past a relatively ugly UI).

The nice thing about this setup is it’s pretty easy to expand to music, ebooks, and audiobooks as well, but for those media types there is less automation for user requests. I haven’t had any issues with scaling up either, I’ve currently got 150+ TB of media.

Hi, if you want to set up a safe, fully-automated streaming service that you can connect to from any device, reach out to me. The only cost to you is the VPN and hard drives if you already have a computer.

You can have your own media server that automatically downloads all the new episodes of shows you want across all streaming services, and your friends and family can even request movies/shows they want to see from a web UI and those will also be automatically downloaded. All using free and open source software. Completely ad free.

Anyone here that also knows how to set this up should also offer to help others, as it is pretty much the only way to break free from streaming services.

One thing about Linux: don’t let people bully you over which distro you use. This isn’t a competition, use what feels most natural to you. If Manjaro is too steep of a curve, start somewhere else. Not everyone needs to be running arch. If you want to use arch but want it easier, I had an easier time with endeavor os than with manjaro, but ymmv. If I were you, I’d use the easiest distro out there: mint. If you are a big gamer, PopOS has a lot of gaming support right out of the box, but these days if you are primarily on Steam then you shouldn’t hit too many issues in any distro.

I am also mid transition, but haven’t booted windows in over a year. I tried dual-access storage, and I think your best bet is to keep the two systems separate. There are ways to make it work, but they are not beginner friendly imo.

As for mods, it is really hit or miss. And kernel level anticheat is a blocker in Linux, so any games that require it will not be playable. But what I do is have a single-drive windows machine that has the software that doesn’t have Linux support installed, and boot into it when I need it. But I’ve actually found linux-friendly replacements for all the stuff I personally use, and will probably never touch the windows system again.