I spend a bunch of time in log reviews in my current role. “Googling the error message” image is literally hanging on my office wall.

Same. I was very impressed by the games that work despite being unsupported. Heck, I’ve got Rainbow Six: Vegas working on it with gamepad support. I couldn’t even do that in Windows.

Honestly Arch-based is a good choice, but straight up Arch for a newbie? Nah.

I’m running EndeavorOS with KDE and it’s been solid for gaming. A few bugs, but mostly minor, like it picked the wrong default NIC driver (but still worked) and SMB shares wouldn’t auto mount recently until an update a week or two ago.

My main PC for non-gaming runs Manjaro. I know there are haters about it, but it’s been a solid distro for general use, and I’ve encountered no issues to speak of.

You’re not likely to do that for $150. You might be able to pull an old Dell Precision T5500 tower with a weak Xeon on eBay for cheap and refit it with more ram, better CPU and cheap non-redundant storage for $200 - $250.

For sake of power requirements though, seriously consider your use case and needs. You can get by pretty well with cheap mini-PCs like Intel NUCs or AMD minis like Beelink for pretty cheap and just cluster them with something like Proxmox to scale out instead of up when you need additional resources. This will be reasonably priced and keep the power bill and noise levels down.

Another chaotic neutral here. I need my vertical display.

My wife and I have somewhere around 450 hours in it (each). It’s fantastic.

Be sure to update the factory files to point it to a better external player. The built in one for Jellyfin sounds terrible.

Eh, I like Plexamp’s features, but the app is not exactly free, more “freemium.” All the compelling features that you’d want to use it for are behind the subscription paywall. DJ, track and album radio, the unique features aren’t free.

Also, at least on iOS the app feels clunky and sluggish with long delays when skipping, scrubbing, playing, and pausing. (EDIT - turns out this is specifically an issue when using Airplay, it’s fine for local playback).

My wife uses Plexamp on desktop (Mac and PC) and it seems good there. I personally tend to use the WiiM app for Wiim mini with Asset UPnP server.

If you have Plex pass there’s a built in auto leveling setting, but it’s not available on the free version.

Alternately foobar2000 or other tools can apply replaygain but you’ll need a tender that will actually use it. I use Asset UPnP.

1070 TI is a fantastic sleeper card. I had the MSI Armor one that was undercooled, I kept the heat plate but removed the shroud and cooler and installed an Arctic Accelero Xtreme IV. Been using it since just after it released, and even after upgrading my gaming rig to an RX 6700 XT, I swapped the 1070 TI into my desktop machine, still runs and games great.