Everything works except Thunderbolt/USB4 and Video output via USB-C
I wouldn't use it as a NAS if you plan to use NVMe SSDs for fast storage (since you can't connect them via USB4), but if you only plan on using SATA SSDs or mechanical drives, USB 3 should be fine. Other than that, everything you would need in a server is there and works flawlessly.
Sure, but you did you download them, listen to them and then delete them, or did you keep them around for archival purposes? Because it's rather untypical to re-listen to a podcast episode many times, which you might do with music.
I don't know, I also use DDG because I can't find a better alternative. I thought you had a better recommendation 😂
The only thing that comes to my mind is 4get, a proxy for DDG which is a little better for your privacy, since you don't have to trust DDG as much. But it lacks some features like DDG's Bangs.
There's also LibreY, a fork of LibreX, which acts as a proxy for Google. Still not great though. The one thing I really like about it, it that it also has a built-in torrent search feature.
I think the best option is SearXNG, you can configure which search engines you want to use, and you can access DDG bangs by using two exclamation marks (e.g. !!yt for YouTube)
Unfortunately there's no good self-hostable search engine with a good web crawler
Why did you download podcasts?
When I finally got a seedbox and started downloading massive amounts of movies, TV shows, games and music (first to the seedbox, then archived everything on my home NAS, deleted everything with lots of seeders from the seedbox to save space, and now I only use it for either new stuff I want to download, or seeding content with very few or no seeders)
Are people sending $5 every now and then
That's still better than nothing I guess
Absolutely
Either use secure, encrypted VoIP calls (e.g. over Signal or another secure messenger with an end-to-end encrypted call feature)
Or you use a secure messenger that only runs on smartphones and doesn't have a desktop client
youtube-local over a Mullvad (other services like Proton or IVPN are great as well) works really well for me