Thank you so much for the tips, with a mix of googling, bit of GPT4 and straight smashing my head against the desk, I've gotten Proxmox installed on the Mac Mini and ordered 16GB of RAM (figured it's worth the $40). Fought a serious battle trying to get to the startup manager with my mechanical keyboard and Dell monitor, eventually got it to boot from the thumb drive and install. I've got an LXC setup with Debian 12 and installed Plex, even managed to get my existing Plex Media folder from my external drive mounted in the container!
Next steps are the IVPN Wireguard killswitch VPN LXC and Transmission LXC, based on the quick reading I've done, it looks like iptables rules is the way to go. I'll more than likely be writing a big post in selfhosted lemmy soon asking if anyone has achieved this already and has the steps. I might look at the *arrs but that is a later project, I am fine with searching, downloading and renaming/moving the files when I want to watch something. We don't have regular shows we download right now.
Final questions before I head into the deep dark world of home server communities.
Doing the Plex setup quickly, I gave it 1 core and 1GB of RAM, gonna guess this isn't enough, if I'm doing Direct Play and transcode for subtitles, how much RAM and how many Cores would you throw at it with my system?
Can this be updated or do I need to create a whole new lxc container if I want to add more cores/ram to it?
For my HD 4000, is it of any use to me with Plex, or is it already being utilized due to it being integrated?
Can I setup a SMB share from the mounted disk in Proxmox? I created a mount point in Proxmox and then edited the containers config file so it mounted in the container.
Any final tips on MUST DO setup on the Proxmox side? Happy to nuke a container and recreate it if need be, but I'd like to make sure the Proxmox side of the house is in a good place from day 1!