Elgato Stream Deck Classic?
Also, wouldn't WiFi count as a separate NIC?
Yep! Any hardware network controller could be called a "NIC".
Come to think of it, I'm remembering that I read about Unraid setups having cache drives for this purpose.
I have no experience with Unraid, but I would not be surprised if that is a common feature.
Thanks for that! I'd like to explore both. Maybe LVM won't be as complicated as I think. I just don't want this to become increasingly more complicated. Sometimes I just want a system to work, y'know? No complicated setup & maintenance; just working. But maybe I won't need to babysit it once it's set up, and I'll learn things along the way.
I would say base your decision on your circumstances. If you absolutely want to get something up and running right away, just go with some basic ext4 filesystems and use qcow2 images. That will be the fastest to get deployed and you will have less things to focus on. I have experimented with qcow images in the past and I have rebuild my entire system multiple times because I wanted to just "start fresh". To me, it is fun to keep trying new things and learning, and I can also understand that trying to learn too much at once can be exhausting. Not only that, but trying to implement too many new things at once is just asking for more problems. It is often best to take things in small steps. In regards to babysitting, though, once you have a clearer idea of your requirements for the setup, there should be little need to monitor anything.
Oh, wow! I feel like I find it interesting that both you and u/nulld3v are developers of some kind.
I'd imagine that there is no shortage of devs in this community. Some of us just like to nerd out over tech.
I feel like I don't need the headache of implementing workarounds for running Windows games. Especially since some of the ones that pique my interest are online multiplayer and their anti-cheats are a PITA.
And, in that case, I'd save Windows VMs for less intensive tasks (like basic office work), and maybe containers for servers like the ones I mentioned above.
Most workarounds aren't difficult, but it is true that some anti-cheat engines are more tedious to work around than others.
I'd save Windows VMs for less intensive tasks (like basic office work)
I've seen a lot of people here say they want a VM for things like MS Office, which is a bit surprising to me since most versions work really well in Wine, they have a web version that is OS agnostic, and there are plenty of other office suites available for non-Windows OSes.
A KVM switch?
Nah. What I was referring to seems to be called a "stream deck"; something like this:
https://www.amazon.com/Elgato-Stream-Deck-Controller-customizable/dp/B06XKNZT1P
Those or even a small keyboard could be passed to a VM that is handling streaming if you are using your mouse and keyboard in another to play games. That way there is no swapping input back and forth.
I take it an NVME cache would help greatly with encoding and I/O overhead?
Caching on NVMe will generally speed up I/O heavy tasks. And since many tasks lock on write operations, having them write somewhere faster will allow the task to continue sooner, then the cache can be written permanently at its leisure.
I'd like to thank you very much for your detailed responses. I really appreciate your help!
No problem! I have fun talking about this stuff and its nice to see people who are actually interested rather than common "why doesn't this work? help me fix this" posts. Those can be fun too sometimes, but its a bit less exciting when the other party cares only about the end itself and not the means to that end. At that point it just feels like IT work, bleh! lol