Depending on the model and brand, there’s probably a YouTube video showing how to disassemble it. This can help you find the keyboard connector and how to disconnect it.

If you’ve got two 3.5" bays, you could do a RAID 1 (or a mirror in ZFS terms) with them both. This works very nicely with a small SSD for booting. My TrueNAS server has a 120 GB SSD in the M.2 slot that TrueNAS is installed on, then I have an array of spinning disks that forms the main storage array.

If you are planning any sort of play environment that you might want to keep (like a Pixelfed instance) I’d strongly recommend RAID just for availability in the event of a drive failure. But more than that, backups. They are of number one importance. Before you turn up anything of any importance, figure out a backup strategy.

• What’s a good NAS OS to install?

TrueNAS Scale is the go to. Unraid is another popular option.

• Any fun things I can do besides plex transcoding with a 1080 GPU?

Local LLM. Look up Ollama.

• Would it make sense to run a Pixelfed/Mastodon server off this guy?

You could. That could potentially use a lot of space or be very annoying you having to manage and moderate the instances.

• Can I run a RAID on it without buying a separate HDD bay?

What do you mean? Are you talking about a hardware RAID card, or can you physically stuff more than one disk drive into the chassis? For the first, it’ll depend on whether it has any open PCI Express slots. For the second, what do you see when you open it up? Are there 3.5" or 5.25" bays open?

Other than a Plex port forward, I have zero experience putting services out on the public web (but would like to learn!).

Wanting to learn is an admirable goal. I’ve not done it myself, but the Linux Upskill Challenge might be a good place to start. Either that, or figure out something you might want to host yourself, then come back and ask for input when you run into trouble or have a question.

I just switched from using Medusa and CouchPotato to Sonarr and Radarr. During the library import process, you can specify if the application should “monitor” the media which is what it means to download new content or try and replace with higher qualities. You can import entire libraries as “Unmonitored” so it will show it, but effectively ignore it unless you go back and change it. You can also just not import your library, and start “clean” if you wanted, and I believe it will just ignore the files for anything you don’t add.

If you mainly want to “hide” your IP, you can’t. Look at the headers of any message. It’ll still show the original source IP, which will be yours.

For the rest of the time I’d recommend getting a spam filtering service. Mimecast, ProofPoint, Barracuda, etc.

Messages sent to you go to the filter, which then forwards the message over to your mail server. Outbound you configure your server to use the filter as a smart host. These filters will also buffer messages if your mail server is offline. So if the server is down, the filter holds on to messages and retries delivery later when your server is back up (within reason).

A 780M is noticeably better than the Steam Deck GPU, which is what it’ll be compared to.

https://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/AMD-Radeon-780M-vs-AMD-Custom-GPU-0405/m2088874vsm1804237

I suspect that price is a bit high for most people. I think it’s largely coming from those screens.

I believe the only way to firmware up an Xbox controller is on an Xbox or through the Xbox Accessories app on Windows. I’ve been using my work laptop to update my Xbox controllers.

As an alternative, some of the 8bitdo controllers are in LVFS, and I’ve heard the PlayStation Controller Firmware Updater works in WINE for DualShock and DualSense controllers.