That is a fair point about needing to have someone troubleshoot for me.
I have been fighting with Plex for 2 years. Tried it on Windows and tried it on TNAS. Despite buying a static IP from my ISP and telling Plex to allow outside connection Plex always said it was unavailable outside my wifi. Most of the time it was anyways, but every once in a while it wouldn't. It would often just a stream in the middle and say the media was no longer available. On LAN and off. Could never link an error log entry with any of these failures. It would often mis identify movies and shows despite me following the naming schema. For example /Media/Movies/Hulk (2008)/Hulk (2008).mkv would often show up as "The Twelve Kingdoms"
I have thousands of discs I am scanning in and after going through 15 tutorials and trial and error I could never get *arrs to work properly. I couldn't get radarr or sonarr to watch folders for ripped movies and move them into the appropriate folder, and tdarr would happily check my files for errors, but refused to convert, compress, or find subtitles for my files. It would just "complete" the task in 1ms and do nothing and report it was done. After trying TDARR on the sixth different computer I almost through it through a window.
I'll look into some of those links you sent, thank you.
I did try linode which advertised one click setup for some of these apps. But it still required dancing just the right dance just the right way and SSH'ing into a linux computer to initialize everything. Once initialized only one of my computers can sync with it, my phone and other computers say invalid connection. After troubleshooting for several days I tore it down and built it back up and now none of my devices can connect.
I do have Proton and that was painless to setup, but when I share files using a public link other people only get a blank screen. They have basically nothing for photos.