Brickfrog

I’ve been using Debian with the default GNOME on an old laptop and main desktop and have been very happy with it. Coming from Windows I love that it’s way simpler and I don’t need to set a million options.

But remember the thing with Linux is you’re not locked into anything - So try GNOME or XFCE for a few weeks, then if you still want something else install and switch over to another desktop environment. You could even install all these desktop environments during the Debian install itself and just keep switching every time you log in.

Just to be sure, did you already test that the port is actually open and forwarded? e.g. with your torrent client running browse to a port test website like https://canyouseeme.org/ , https://www.yougetsignal.com/tools/open-ports/ , etc. put in your torrent client’s incoming port and check if the website can “see” your open port at your torrent client.

And the ISP (or router) itself isn’t doing anything weird to block torrents, right? In your torrent client if you click any working public torrent, click on the Trackers tab, you should see DHT as working along with whatever open trackers are on the public torrent. In other words you won’t see anything like “waiting” something (I forget the exact message you’ll see when DHT is being blocked but it’ll definitely not be working).

EDIT: Also if it’s a new ISP with new router it might have firewall rules set up that are slowing things down, something to check.

The copy protections on Blu rays are exceptionally annoying, to the extent where there is really only one closed source software – MakeMKV – that can work around them.

Not quite, RedFox formerly SlySoft (RIP) used to market their own Blu-ray ripper and it worked quite well. What it used to do is on-the-fly decryption so you’d run it in the background and could use any other software to read the decrypted Blu-ray (e.g. using Handbrake or whatever). It did also have an option to just rip to a file IIRC. Unfortunately they randomly disappeared so their software is pretty much done. (some background on wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RedFox)

That aside they always a competitor, DVDFab, that still exists today. Their Passkey software is the rough equivalent of what the old RedFox/SlySoft software used to do but they also sell a standalone Blu-ray ripper if that’s more your thing (see https://www.dvdfab.cn/).

But yeah, in some ways you’re stuck with MakeMKV, DVDFab, and maybe some others (?).

I’d have to dig it out but I actually bought a Blu-ray drive a while back that was on the list of drives compatible with these rippers but honestly it’s been a few years since I’ve tried using it. Most times someone else already ripped a Blu-ray I’d be interested in.

Speaking of - If anyone knows offhand, how do people do this stuff on Linux? Does the Linux version of MakeMKV work well for this and/or are there other tools (?)

Wake on LAN is a LAN feature, not WAN, so you’d need to issue that over the local LAN there at the house. You’re going to have a hard time trying to get that working over the WAN (if that’s even possible).

The other comments mentioning a scheduled boot would be a much easier/simple solution if it works for you.

But I’ll throw this in, the super basic least tech solution to this is to open a port forward to the house’s network router. Yes, I know you don’t want to do that, but it’s probably the only network device at that house that’s actually on 24/7 right? And by all means lock it down however you like. My simple method is to open the router login to a non-standard port number, with a IP whitelist, add my own home IP address to that IP whitelist, and bam you now have access to that remote home’s router for just your IP address. Log in remotely, issue a wake on LAN via the router’s own web ui, done.

It’s perfectly reasonable to make this a bit more secure if you wanted but it gets slightly more complicated - open a non-standard port for SSH access to the remote router’s SSH port that only allows SSH login with key. Generate a SSH key and share that key with yourself, then you can log in remotely to that remote house via non-standard SSH port using the SSH key (no user/passwords). From there you’d have to see if you can issue Wake on LAN on the SSH command line, or set up a SSH tunnel from that remote LAN to yours so you can proxy into the router login page and do your Wake on LAN from there. … yes I realize this got complicated :/ But you’ve got a few things to explore given your patience for tinkering with this stuff :)

Of course much of this relies on that house’s router having any of these features to enable and configure. The main takeaway here is that Wake on LAN requires something on 24/7 at that remote LAN for you to enable remote access into and issue a Wake on LAN command within that LAN. How to actually accomplish that is the tricky bit.

When I first started using GNOME the top bar was a bit off-putting but I got used to it TBH. It’s not something I think about much nowadays.

However, you actually can move it to the side or to the bottom, and/or change it in other ways, with the dash-to-panel extension so definitely check that out if the top bar is bugging you https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1160/dash-to-panel/

Windows To Go was discontinued back in 2019 so it’s not really something that has been maintained or updated for a long time

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_To_Go#Discontinuation

Apps like Rufus (Windows only) are still able to create that sort of boot USB but it’s sort of a non supported feature, wouldn’t be surprised if it just stops working one day.

On Linux Ventoy is often used for this - it does have a persistence plugin but not for Windows https://www.ventoy.net/en/plugin_persistence.html

I haven’t tested this idea, but maybe you can run a Windows VM within Linux, enable USB in it, download Rufus in it, then you can create your non-official Windows To Go boot disk that way? Could be something to try if you never find another solution.

Always good to double check, but yes, I used canyouseeme and the port is definitely open.

That means TCP should be working as expected with the current configuration. Note those port test websites are only testing TCP, not UDP.

A few menu options below the one for port forwarding

I’m not familiar with ProtonVPN configuration so can’t guide you much there, presumably if the port forwarding option only allows for one setting then maybe it’s doing both TCP/UDP? I dunno…

there’s another for configuring the connection as OpenVPN(TCP), OpenVPN(UDP), or Wireguard.

Don’t worry about that one, that’s for configuring the VPN client you will be using to connect to the VPN server. It should not affect the port forward itself unless ProtonVPN is doing something odd.

I’ve had other issues in the past and Transmission’s internal port testing thing

Yeah I wouldn’t rely on that, the internet port test inside the torrent client isn’t always reliable. But in theory it should show up as open all the time if you have a stable open port :/

Could I be missing a step with the trackers?

Doubt it being a tracker issue, they update themselves on their own schedule usually.

I also have a client I’m trying to test uploading to, but it can’t seem to connect to the seedbox

Maybe should have asked this before - can the test torrent client see that there is a seed on the torrent? Or does it load the torrent but just isn’t seeing any seeds or peers at all? The open trackers take a bit to update themselves with a new torrent hash so sometimes it just takes a bit before the torrent client sees a seed and begins downloading from it.

Just to double-check did you already test that the open port is actually open and connectable from the internet? e.g. use any port test website & see if it can connect to your seedbox Transmission open port e.g. https://www.canyouseeme.org/ , https://portchecker.co/ or similar.

Also, not sure how the open port itself was configured but make sure it is open for both TCP and UDP traffic if you needed to specify that during your firewall setup.

Like some of the other comments, if you really need a DE then maybe give XFCE or LXQt a try. The distro itself won’t matter too much in your scenario.

I do have an old laptop that has run Debian/Ubuntu + Gnome fine, not at all fast but usable for my needs. Mines has 4 GB RAM, get the feeling that going under 4 GB may be a bit much.

Otherwise Linux is perfectly usable without a DE if you’re willing to stick to the terminal for all your usage.

There is an Linux compatible open source player being developed called fooyin (https://fooyin.org/) heavily inspired by foobar2000. When I tried it out a few months back it was still a bit rough for day-to-day use but it could eventually become a good alternative for people that miss the foobar2000 style player.

Pretty sure Strawberry does everything you are looking for.

re: #1 I kind of had the same issue but with multiple music folders, most of the default music apps only let you use one folder. Strawberry lets you add as many music folders as you like, I’ve been happy with it.

On Windows I used to use foobar2000 which was great, and in theory I could get it running under Linux, but I’d rather just use something coded for Linux compatibility from the start.

I still use Virtualbox, configuration is way easier with the GUI

To be fair you can pair KVM/qemu with any GUI manager and have a similar interface to VirtualBox/Hyper-V/VMWare/etc. virt-manager (https://virt-manager.org/) is a popular one for example, I just started using it and it seems to work well for what I need.

Normally I’ve been using VirtualBox but for whatever reason it asks me to recompile the kernel on Debian 13 just to launch. Meanwhile qemu just works.

Don’t know if this helps you but did you already try changing Disk IO Type to Simple pread/pwrite (in advanced settings)? It was meant to address some issues with disk read/write + RAM usage. Not something that affected me all that much but could be worth a look.

Was mentioned in the 5.0.1 release notes and in the github pages

https://www.qbittorrent.org/news

https://github.com/qbittorrent/qBittorrent/pull/21300

Beyond that I’d echo the other comment, try to just change settings you actually need to change. Oftentimes people make a whole ton of settings changes in their torrent client and then can’t figure out how to get it back to normal.

https://interviewfor.red/

https://interview.orpheus.network/ (might not be doing interviews right now per the other comment)

Never needed to use this but have seen that tools like https://github.com/fedarovich/qbittorrent-cli are able to export lists of loaded torrents in various formats, it might do what you want.

e.g. if you’re going to load the output in LibreCalc then you probably want to export a list in csv format most likely (the project’s wiki mentions it https://github.com/fedarovich/qbittorrent-cli/wiki/Output-Formats).

so when choosing which content to purge, I want to just sort by Ratio in qBittorrent and start purging anything older than 30 days that isn’t getting uploads. The problem is, more often than not I’m cross seeding the same content across multiple trackers, so although a specific torrent on a specific trackers may be performing poorly, that doesn’t mean the same content isn’t performing well on another tracker.

Something to consider for the future, you could re-work how you are storing your torrent data and hardlink all those cross-seeding torrents in their own folders. So if you do a full delete of one torrent + data it won’t actually affect the torrent + data of other torrents. If you have it split out like that then you could even try to automate the whole process of deleting old torrents with tools like https://github.com/Hundter/qBittorrent-Ratio-Manager or https://github.com/Mythic82/Qbittorrent-auto-delete

On Linux it would be something like

cp -al /home/barnaclebill/mytorrents/trackera/thismovie.2025 /home/barnaclebill/mytorrents/trackerb/

Would hardlink the same torrent data in two places so that torrents for trackera can point to the trackera folder and torrents for trackerb can point to the trackerb folder.

This doesn’t answer your main question but I suspect their thinking is that VPN use is already very common in torrent communities. So common that it’s not really a big deal for users to browse the site via VPN if necessary. It’s not really that the staff there is going to do age verification, realistically if necessary they’d likely just block access from whatever states/jurisdictions are giving them issues with age verification.

That aside not too sure if what you’re looking for currently exists. There are a few general torrent sites that also operate Tor / I2P domains, and also the general torrent indexer Postman exists on I2P. The amount of users in Tor / I2P networks is way lower vs the clearnet torrent sites so a hyper-focused torrent site in Tor / I2P doesn’t seem viable but I could be wrong.

Yes, that’s why qBittorrent’s “Download first and last pieces first” option exists. You’ll be able to stream that .mp4 with its moov atom at the end of the file as long as you download that last piece during the beginning of the download. In some ways that makes qBittorrent a better streamer for .mp4 files vs other methods.

Maybe the other commenter is referring to some other media file type that can’t be streamed.

EDIT - Haven’t checked but am guessing torrentio also downloads first/last pieces first otherwise it’d be a terrible torrent streamer.

Hmm, having checked “Download first and last pieces first” usually fixes that. e.g. a .mp4 with its moov atom at the end of the file won’t stream unless you make sure to download the last part of the file starting out. Just curious which media file type are you referring to that won’t stream regardless of having the first/last pieces downloaded?

But either way OP using Stremio + torrentio won’t fix that, that’s just another torrent client doing a torrent stream. If it won’t play mid-stream via qBittorrent it won’t play mid-stream in torrentio either.

Since you’re just streaming torrents you could just use a torrent client to download the torrent(s) in sequential mode.

e.g. Load the torrent in qBittorrent and make sure to enable “Download in sequential order” and “Download first and last pieces first”. When the torrent is about 5-10% downloaded you can start playing the incomplete file while the torrent continues to download in the background. Load the file in your preferred media player (VLC or whatever) and play.

They are slightly different, I think people are kind of asking if you are specifically looking for a VPS vs a seedbox. Some people do want a VPS so it’s a fair question.

A VPS implies that you’ll be renting a server and installing/setting up all the software on your own. You’ll probably have some sort of SSH + root access to install things there since you’re doing all that on your own.

A seedbox is more like a pre-configured shared VPS so it’ll already have torrent clients pre-installed along with other software commonly used with torrent clients. Depending on the vendor and type of seedbox you often won’t have root access and/or SSH access, usually the vendor won’t want you to randomly install software system-wide that might disrupt other users on that seedbox server.

PS - !seedboxes@lemmy.dbzer0.com also exists, a bit quieter there but it’s specific to the topic.