This is my first setup since moving away from home and into my own place with my partner. I finally had the ability to setup my Raspberry Pi running Plex, qBittorrent, and a Samba share. We use Plex more than we use Apple TV or Netflix at this point because it is just so much less of a hassle, and we would cancel them immediately if we did not get them free with our phone plan.
I have my work Macbook and PC both connected to a KVM to easily switch between the two. I run both Win10Pro and ZorinOS in dual-boot, but I primarily use Windows as the last thing I want to do after work most days is write code (I’m a software engineer). Recently my PC’s primary use has been to stream games to my Steam Deck that it is not powerful enough to run. My partner and I spend a good amount of time on the couch playing our own games next to each other as they’ve recently taken over the living room TV with their PC to play their millionth run of Stardew Valley.
I’ve mostly been playing Tetris Effect Connected but I just finally got around to starting RDR2, so that will probably take over soon enough. I also jump between The Binding of Isaac, Borderlands 2, and Minecraft quite a bit.
I added some more pictures below. The decorations around my desk are nothing spectacular, but they are all things that make me happy, and I don’t like to be surrounded by too much unnecessary clutter. If you have any questions about my setup feel free to ask!
I followed this guide from PiMyLifeUp. I’m a pretty technical person, but I’ve been leaning on their guides more and more because they’re so damn simple, and I’m tired of feeling like I’m reading the Linux equivalent of medical journals.
One issue I ran into was the qbittorrent user that is created did not have rwx access to the directory I was downloading files to causing my torrents to stall, so be aware of that. You also need a small fan for the Pi’s processor otherwise it will overheat. Other than that we just have a 2TB SSD connected over USB to the Pi 3B+ and it works great, even with 4k BluRay content.
Once you get the qBittorrent server set up, set the default download location as a library in Plex and as long as you enable autoscan torrents should automatically get ingested into Plex once they finish. The setup also makes it way easier to seed and get super high ratios if you’re into that. Then you can connect to qBittorrent from anywhere on your local network and give it magnet links, or even setup ZeroTier One as a P2P VPN to allow you to connect from remote networks. Currently it is setup to tunnel all traffic through ProtonVPN running on Wireguard.