Its been a long time now but probably around when South Park left Netflix, I started pirating again. Now I have a massive Plex server and home lab dedicated to piracy. AND I STILL PAY ~$20/m for Usenet lol.
Unrelated, but fun example as South Park is probably the only show on TV that also let people watch the entire show (-latest seasons it seems) for free online! https://www.southparkstudios.com/seasons/south-park
Been like that (in many places) for many many years at this point too :)
Isn't that only for people in the US?
I don't know if that website works/shows full episodes in the US, currently I'm in a EU country and everything except the last two seasons seems available.
Plex is a pretty light-weight system as long as transcoding is avoided or it has hardware transcoding available to use.
And wrangling Usenet is a fairly simple affair on vaguely modern PC hardware, too.
So all of that stuff runs in the background on the same desktop Linux box that I also use for everything else.
Am I doing it wrong?
Plex, meanwhile? It is much more approachable by the lays.
My elderly mother can watch my media with a cheap little Roku box while she sits on the sofa at her house many miles away with a remote control in her hand, using Plex.
- Each member of my family gets their watch progress individually tracked down to how many minutes they made it into each video, across devices.
- The server's GPU automatically transcodes video into the best format for the device, display resolution, and available bandwidth. Very helpful for streaming stuff off the home server while away from home to optimize battery life and bandwidth.
- Automatically pulling subtitles from opensubtitles. Very handy if you have a multingual family who enjoys foreign media shows together. The paid streaming services are mostly abysmal at subtitling.
- A soft reason: My family members are seriously impressed by how nice the web UI is compared to Amazon Prime Video, Peacock, etc. It's literally opened their eyes to how software doesn't have to be bad - capitalism makes software bad over time.
But most of my multi-os stuff happens with VMs these days.
After I spent a few years successfully running Windows as my primary desktop OS, as a virtual machine (with its own dedicated CPU cores and accessories like GPU), the lines between separate computers and different operating systems permanently became very blurry to me.
Sounds like you could be interested in Qubes OS, which runs everything in VMs by default with an amazing UI. (My daily driver.)