PIA and Mullvad should have equal speeds because they both have 10gbps servers and wireguard. Both PIA and Mullvad use ram-only servers exclusively. As for search engine captchas, I never get them with Mullvad. The main issue with PIA is that they were bought by a questionable company that previously developed adware. You can read about that here. Personally, I would never use a privacy tool that is owned by an ad company, even if they claim to have changed. I used them up until the acquisition, then switched and have been extremely happy with Mullvad.

1337x is my favorite right now for TV/movies and Nyaa for anime. Between that and Usenet, I can get 99.5% of what I want.

I use qbittorent and Sabnzb for downloads.

Since you've been out of the piracy game for awhile you may consider looking into *arr apps (radarr, sonarr, prowlarr, etc). They can auto download movies/tv you want and format them in a way that Plex/Jellyfin like, so you can get a whole library of content with just a few clicks. There's a bit of a learning curve to the setup though.

Most of Percy Jackson took place outside of Camp Half Blood, unlike Harry Potter, which takes place mostly at Hogwarts, so it's not surprising that Hogwarts got more detail. Also, Camp Half Blood had like 50 people in it unlike Hogwarts that had hundreds, so naturally it'd be less noteworthy.

Edit: I just checked and only 6 of 22 chapters of The Lighting Thief take place at CHB.

Well, I started using their repos for their x86-64-v3 optimized packages and builds of popular packages from the AUR. Later I started using their kernel because it pulls in upcoming features and is compiled with optimizations like ThinLTO and AutoFDO and has a more advanced scheduler. I also like how Cachyos comes with things like zram pre-enabled and scripts for things like zink and NGX. It's basically just a ton of small things like that, some that I don't even know about yet, that makes CachyOS really nice and easy to use.

https://wiki.cachyos.org/cachyos_basic/why_cachyos/

From the article:

“Industry traffic has declined in major markets like the U.S., Australia, Canada, and Germany. In several markets, we also continue to be negatively impacted by the war in the Middle East,” McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski said on the company’s earnings call.

So it does seem to be working to some extent.

I've been using it for a while now, and it's genuinely so good. Before this I was using EndeavourOS which was also a great distro, but I realized that I was basically putting in work to do things CachyOS does out of the box, so I switched and it's been great.

People are welcome to mod games in whatever way they want, but Nexusmods has zero obligation to host anything, let alone content that violates their TOS.

As long as you're using modern drivers, such as 570 or later (preferably 575), your experience should generally be fine.

Nvidia rightfully earned their bad reputation on linux, but over the last year or two they've put a ton of work into improving it, specifically in wayland support.

One of the last major open issues is DX12 performance. DX12 performance is kinda all over the place depending on your hardware, game, and game settings, but you can generally expect around a 20% performance hit to DX12 games compared to windows. DX11, opengl, and vulkan games perform about as well as windows. Dx12 performance on Nvidia has been a known issue for years and Nvidia was silent on it, but just a few months ago they finally publically acknowledged it and claimed they were working on it. In my experience, Nvidia typically pretends problems don't exist until they actually decide to fix them, so we can probably start expecting improvements to DX12 performance soon.

I've been exclusively gaming with Nvidia on linux (CachyOS) for about a year now and my experience has been satisfactory, so you should be fine.

HEVC 10 bit in order to reduce banding for animation, especially during dark scenes. I know H264 Hi10 exists, but it has poor hardware support, so using HEVC 10 bit is the best option (I don't own a single streaming device that supports HW accelerated Hi10, besides my PC). Also, an added benefit is reduced file size. I find that doing my own encodes is very rarely worth it, but when I do, I use FFmpeg in the CLI and not tdarr.

Plex does support FLAC. It's transcoding to reduce data usage. You always have the option of playing the original, I'm doing it right now.

The English were the ones that created the term soccer. It grew in popularity in America as soccer, then eventually fell out of popularity in Britain. In fact, a lot of the differences between words in the US and Britain are that Brits started using a different version of the word and Americans kept using the old one. Not all, but a lot.

Source: https://time.com/5335799/soccer-word-origin-england/

They sorta do. Flatpak user install puts shims in ~/.local/share/flatpak/exports/bin/. You just need to add it to your path.

I'm pretty sure flatpak system installs are at /var/lib/flatpak/exports/bin/ so you'd just add that to path.

Banding is that annoying color gradient you see sometimes in dark scenes.

On the left is 8 bit and on the right is 10 bit.

It's not so much that I can't find things on torrents, it's that I don't have to worry about something not having seeders so it's more reliable for old uploads. In addition I've found it to be better for single episodes, multiple release groups that I use seem to only use Usenet.

As for things that aren't movies/tv, I think Usenet is better for slightly more obscure content, such as comic books.

Dishonest and unwarranted? What?

They dragged their feet on wayland and tried to force EGLStreams for years, causing a ton of work for open source devs. Their drivers on linux are still significantly more annoying to install than AMD or Intel and still use proprietary userspace drivers. This all and more is the definition of earning their bad reputation.

You know what's dishonest and unwarranted? You trying to twist my words and imply I compared them to other manufacturers when I didn't. More than one company can rightfully earn a bad reputation, and ATI definitely did as well. Nvidia was indeed better for a long while, and then earned their bad reputation over the later 2010s and early 2020s.

Cage is designed around running a single maximized application. Wayback is meant to run an entire x11 desktop environment.

Not sure about the second part.

I prefer nanazip to 7zip because it's just forked 7zip that's been updated for modern windows. They're working on a dark mode too.

The IP address that a request is coming from can absolutely cause captchas to be triggered. If the host is seeing a lot of bot activity from your IP, it'll do that. That and blacklisting is why Mullvad rotates IPs.

Overseerr - Request management and media discovery tool for the Plex ecosystem, can auto add requests to Sonarr/Radarr

Jellyseerr - Fork of Overseerr for Jellyfin support