As someone with “founder” status in both services, Stadia’s user experience was far better. It also had the best latency with its direct connect controllers.

While GeForce Now made some steps towards mitigation and cooperation, with 2FA it’s often still a mess of tediously logging into PC launchers before finally being able to play. And because the hardware changes every time, this repeats before every session.

GFN’s library of compatible games is still stupidly limited, yet has all remaining competitors beat by a wide margin. And it has by far the most powerful hardware.

Both of those things probably make it the best streaming service right now, and outweigh the shortcomings. But “good” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.

Are you seriously suggesting running a Plex server on the Steam Deck in addition to the Plex media player? Because last I checked, the Plex media player can play (I think) but not index them. I’m a happy Plex user with lifetime Plex pass, but that’s just stupid.

Kodi is a solid standalone solution for exactly what OP is asking, with controller support. Kodi wouldn’t be my first choice for networked media playback, but it’s brilliant for exactly OP’s use case. And it really isn’t laggy unless you overload it with plugins.

OP is talking about local content! Attached to the dock. Plex App is not the right solution for that. Kodi is probably their best choice.

Unraid 6.12 and higher has full support for ZFS pools. You can even use ZFS in the Unraid Array itself - allowing you to use many, but not all, of ZFS extended features. Self healing isn’t one of those features, though, it would be incompatible with Unraid’s parity approach to data integrity.

I just changed my cache pool from BTRFS to ZFS with Raid 1 and encryption, it was a breeze.

I generally recommend TrueNAS for projects where speed and security are more important than anything else and Unraid where (hard- and software-)flexibility, power efficiency, ease of use and a very extensive and healthy ecosystem are more pressing concerns.

Unraid is also awesome for places with high energy cost: Unlike with your typical RAID / standard NAS, it allows you to spin down all drives that aren’t in active use at a relatively minor write speed performance penalty.

That’s pretty ideal for your typical Plex-server where most data is static.

I built a 10HDD + 2SSD Unraid Server that idles at well below 30W and I could have even lowered that further had I been more selective about certain hardware. In a medium to high energy cost country, Unraid’s license cost is compensated by energy savings within a year or two.

Mixing & matching older drives means even more savings.

Simple array extension, single or dual parity, powerful cache pool tools and easily the best plugin and docker app store make it just such a cool tool.