Dell optiplex desktop or workstation would def be a gpod idea. Both are much quieter than servers - you can get the workstation if you want a xeon chip and ecc memory - otherwise the desktop will likely do what you need.

Oops!

Look into PICO PSU. Its a small powersupply that uses a power brick to downsize internals. It's used by homelabbers sometimes.

If Tidal isn't your cup of tea, check out Qobuz - I've had a better experience with it. It doesn't pay artists as well as spotify, but I think it's still more than Spotify (iirc)

Try out void, it's pretty fire

Handbrake is a frontend to ffmpeg, so that's also an option

Perhaps you could configure more than unbound service behind a loadbalancer. Each unbound instance is configured to use different upstream dns servers.

Double check if unbound doesn't allow you to randomly hop between dns upstreams first, but the above solution should work if that's unavailable atm.

Yes its possible 👍

Use:

forward-zone:
  forward-addr: 9.9.9.9@853#dns.quad9.net

UNRAID is designed to run off a USB drive, they have recommendations on what USBs to buy on their site, might be worth a gander. You should be able to write all the info on your current USB to the new one without having to reconfigure anything.

How is running a container in an LXC worse than in a VM? It's not really, is it? No, not really. Kubernetes could also be built on top of the LXC as well, sure. There are a number of genuine benifits from running docker on top of an LXC, and it doesn't compromise security or come with a significant performance drop (unlike VMs).

LXCs let you get all the benifits of VMs with fewer drawbacks, I recommend that approach if you want some extra sandboxing than docker on bare metal provides.

That's my current configuration, it works well. Put your storage on a separate network. I use smb shares so my data is password protected, even on that separate network.

Main downside of this is there's more places for failure to occur. If your NAS goes down, there's no storage access for proxmox which may cause service downtime. Alternatively if proxmox goes down, this also causes service downtime. For me this is fine, but something to keep in mind. Ideal solution would be 2 HA clusters for storage and compute, but thats expensive haha.