If you already have a NAS, (since SMB was mentioned, I’m assuming there’s some sort of NAS setup going) then you may even be able to host Plex directly on the NAS. It likely won’t be powerful enough for things like video transcoding, but just audio should be fine.

Sure, but that feels a little bit like saying “We don’t need guards inside the prison, because we already have them patrolling around the perimeter.”

It’s important because it allows them to directly modify the CPU’s microcode. Basically, the CPU has its own set of instructions, called microcode, which controls how the chip functions on a physical level. If they manage to change your microcode, even a full system reformat won’t kill the virus; You’ll need to either re-flash the CPU (which is not something the standard user or even power user will know how to do) or replace the entire CPU.

Glad you figured your edit out before you got too deep. Yeah, port forwarding is a tricky beast, because there’s no “good” way to do it. Either you have open ports exposed to the internet, or you have everything bouncing off of a third-party service. Neither option is great.

You can hide all of that on your sidebar customization settings, but yeah it’s annoying that it’s turned on by default. The Discover is occasionally useful, but I honestly use Overseerr for discoverability more than I use Plex’s built-in search.

My biggest complaint with Plex is the lack of support for .m3u8 playlists. I want to be able to give it a list of livestreams, and then tune into those via Plex. Plex obviously already has live-streaming support built in via their Plex channels, but they have actively worked against custom livestream playlists, (it used to be supported via an extension, but they removed extension support.)

Nice try, NSA.