SirNuke

I think you'll find that awful or lazy was never true, and the potential was always there buried deep. You just didn't have the right tools.

Honestly that's where I would start. It takes some "no I'm in the driver's seat, I decide what I'm working on, I decide when I'm done" reminders so I'm working on the right things, but I don't really procrastinate. Unless it's something I really don't want to work on, but that's kind of a different problem.

If they've worked well in the past beyond the initial break in period I know some people do well with short breaks. Five days on, weekends off, though I would want to be functional outside of work days.

Do you (OP) have an ADHD diagnosis? Honestly for me the only thing that truly helped me work on things when there wasn't immediate external pressure/payoff or it being super interesting was medication.

And believe me, I tried a lot of things.

Do you have any trouble with cooling or anything with them? Got like a billion unused PCIe lanes in my Dell R730 and can think of a few things that might benefit from a big NVMe ZFS pool.

What's the DEAL with WIVES anyway

Poorly, in retrospect. The best period of my life was four ish years pre COVID when I got into the bad habit of drinking a lot of caffeine, without realizing that it was helping me. It was also inadvertently ripped away from me when I went remote and was cut off from my bottomless source of coffee and pop and energy drinks.

One of my takeaways when I started proper medication is that I in fact did know all the organization tricks in the book - the missing piece was the medication, not knowledge.

Likely an attempt to claim there's fewer calories per slice, even though people will just cut it in quarters instead of fifths.

If you go back further, there's The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boino which is where things get real weird.

Specifically Endless Dungeons, which is a spiritual successor to Dungeon of the Endless and comes out in a few months.

@TrenchcoatFullofBats I think this is the winning answer. Looks like it's about a 1060 6GB, which should be enough horsepower for several desktop VMs, and keeps open my full profile slots should I ever want to install something even more powerful in the future. vGPU support is also nice so I don't have to juggle which VM gets which GPU.

Yep unfortunately. I would start with an Nvidia Shield or similar on the Samsung if that's definitely where you want the 4k content. That's more or less what I did, though I've evolved to where I want streaming to work perfect out of the box on whatever screen I feel like using.

The good news is you don't need a lot of server (that's good)

But you want very specific functionality (that's bad)

Optimal hardware is not expensive, a reasonably modern Dell/HP/whatever desktop is probably fine (that's good)

But it's more complicated than "find something with H264/H265 support" because there's like eighty flavors of everything and you might want things like AV1 so you don't have to swap hardware in the future and you can run into problems where driver or library issues just randomly breaks certain codec combinations and there's no Just Buy This answer. (...)

.... that's bad. (can I go now)

Your options are something with more HP on the server side, or something that can direct play at the TV side. I've discovered a Ryzen 3300X is just not quite powerful enough to transcode 4k content, so I'm in the process of migrating media off my NAS and onto a dedicated server with an Intel 8700. The easiest path on the server side is to get an older Dell/HP/whatever desktop with as new of an Intel CPU as you can find - newer iGPUs support more codecs, but the 8th generation (like my 8700) seems to be a decent sweetspot. The Intel A380 also supports everything under the sun and is pretty cheap. Keep in mind you'll need PlexPass or switch to Jellyfin if you want GPU transcoding.

On the playback side, I think Nvidia Shield is your best bet. I've found my Roku stick works well with most video content, but generally needs transcoding if I turn on subtitles :/ I used an M1 Mac Mini as an HTPC, which handled everything extremely well but it's not as TV friendly nor as cheap - if it supported HDMI 2.1 and 4k120hz output I'd probably still be using it as an HTPC.