Yep on both my laptops. But I run Ubuntu on my selfhosting nuc and the vps I use as a wireguard reverse proxy - it’s a lot easier to update those every 6 months that way.

Not really just Plex, in addition to powering 6 spinning drives (~50TB total), I also run Nextcloud, immich, Ollama (CPU inference, no GPU), home assistant, grocy, vaultwarden, jellyfin, sonarr, radarr, lidarr, prowlarr, flaresolverr, and overseerr. I run Plex on a separate Intel nuc10 (also included in that $10 of electricity) which has Intel QuickSync which allows me to transcode ~8 simultaneous 1080 streams to friends while leaving most of the rest of the CPU to everything else like running LLMs on the CPU (it’s cheaper to run larger models on a slower CPU with lots of RAM compared to buying a GPU with a matching amount of vram).

So yeah if you don’t care about n+2 double redundant disks or sharing with more than like 5 people or hosting other apps or running AI while people are streaming then yeah you should totally get something less power hungry. Just the Intel nuc10 I use for Plex (but not media storage) has a TDP of 25W so just that would lower the electricity cost to like $2.50/mo.

I mainly chose to just use the cost of my whole setup’s electricity as an example because it didn’t seem worth it to think about how to split up the idle wattage between services especially when it’s gong to come in at way lower than the combined cost of all the major streaming services anyways, plus I don’t want anyone accusing me of needing to underestimate to make my point - even if I overestimate, it’s way cheaper.

I remember when Netflix first introduced the ad supported plan and a lot of people were like this is how they make you pay extra to not see ads, and a lot of other people called that fud because it’s an additional tier and the normal tier isn’t impacted.

At the time I was yelling that it was just the first step - create an ad free plan, wait for people to calm down, then slowly raise the prices until the ad supported plan costs as much as the ad free one used to. And there you have it, they charged extra to not see ads, just with extra steps.

I quit Netflix back then and I’m so glad I did. $10/mo in electricity gets me every streaming service on my Plex, that’s like a $100/mo value and I get to share it with all my friends.

I’m not sure how you figure that I’m “so angry”, I thought my reply was pretty calm. All I’m pointing out is that valve treats their own employees very well, and that if you have an issue with how developers working for other companies are treated / paid, your beef lies with those companies.

Hell valve doesn’t even charge their cut on steam key sales on other storefronts even though activating the key / downloading the game still uses steam infrastructure.

Then maybe you should complain about the game company that employs those developers, not valve…?