It’s written specifically for unraid, but given they are mainly python scripts, it may work on other systems.
Requires plex and the *arr stack.
https://www.reddit.com/r/unRAID/comments/14f2bzb/movie_churn_solution_on_plex_autogetautodelete/
My use case sounds similar to yours, so I’d second the T480. I got one 7-8 months ago, and it’s been great so far. Only thing I changed was I put in a backlit keyboard.
I don’t know any general laptop communities. At leasr not ones with any activity, but !thinkpad@lemmy.ml seems relatively active.
If you ever need to find a community, https://lemmyverse.net/communities is a decent place to start.
I’ve got a Mikrotik RB4011, and I couldn’t be happier with it. It definitely has a learning curve, but once I got it setup how I want, it just works. I’m sure some other options have the same feature, but one of my favorite things is a script I have run every night that emails me a backup.
I’ve only ever had to use it a few times, but having a recent backup of my router on hand all the time is nice.
I host it on a VPS since I was hesitant about having something like this hosted at home. As far as spinning it up, it was relatively straightforward using the docker instructions (https://join-lemmy.org/docs/administration/install_docker.html).
I ran into some issues with the postfix container not being able to send emails, but it turned out I just needed to ask my VPS provider to unblock port 25 for SMTP.
Pretty much anything I can. It’s too much to type out, but my Homepage lists most of it minus any databases or reverse proxies. I also host a one person Lemmy instance. Everything but Lemmy is run on a 2013 gaming PC with Unraid.
EDIT: After posting this, I’ll probably end up selfhosting an imgur alternative too…
I used syncthing for a while. Then tried github with mostly terrible results. Now i’m back on syncthing. It involves a little bit of setup, but i mostly forget about it now. It just works.