In terms of telemetry, free software has the advantage over the proprietary counterpart.
It’s a lot more complicated to hide telemetry without the user knowing in free software.
You could always use a network tool, like iftop, to see network traffic on your PC. That could be a way too see if a program is phoning home. But you’ll probably want to use a suite of tools.
Legality will depend on the country your in.
But assuming your traffic to/from the server is encrypted, your probably okay.
There’s no point in cheating. Any good private tracker will let maintain a sizeable buffer assuming you seed with things like bonus points/free leech.
If it’s difficult to maintain a buffer, plan to move to a different tracker that will.
Plus, the big private trackers communicate with one another. Get caught in one, you’ll be found out in others.
I’m not familiar with e/OS/ but fairphone recently released their phone to the US market with this OS preinstalled.
I think people often mix up capitalism with market-based economies. The former describes social relations while the former describes how commodities are distributed.
I’m personally not a fan of either. A planned economy geared toward people’s need, with the withering away of socio-ecomic classes (no more worker and capitalist distriction) just makes better sense to me.
+1 for Jellyfin. GPL licensed software so nice.
If your on a budget, an older Thinkpad is a good choice. I picked up a X220 with a charger and spare battery off of Craiglist a year ago for $60.
Ended up going with Coreboot with a SeaBIOS payload and Debian OS.
Qbittorrent-nox. However I’m not completely sure if nox has support for a torrent creator tool like Qbittorrent does.
Too add on to this, many private trackers will not disable your account for inactivity if you reach a certain user class or make a one time donation (including OPS).
Plus reaching out to the staff on IRC is a good way to have an account re-enabled if it does get disabled.
Amassing a media library is simple enough, and software like jellyfin can pull in media info and make your media streamable on various devices with a polished UI.
However, finding good quality (in terms of merit) movies and shows is difficult.
Maybe start with movies critics or a movie discussion platform like letterboxd to see what others are watching/rating movies.