The whole sticker implementation is absolute dog shit. How hard could it be to do a half decent implementation with customizable keywords for searching, custom sticker categorization, and backups? I have hundreds, if not over a thousand, stickers and it’s impossible to access them quickly to find the one you want. You end up just adapting to whatever is on your most used list, and you’re stuck scrolling for a while to find a different sticker, which In an active chat group it means you end up reacting super late to everything and the chat has moved on at that point.
MSN and the MSN+ plugin had this nailed down 20 years ago. Even telegram has a better implementation where you just add the entire sticker library for each new sticker; you end up with stickers you didn’t ask for, which is a negative, but everything ends up categorized in SOME way at least.
Its also ridiculous that whatsapp can’t be bothered to offer sticker creation in-app.
Dont get me started on chat participants count limitations and how utterly USELESS archiving a chat is. You can mute the chat and archive it, and a single message will just pop it back to the top of your list, as if you weren’t trying to actively avoid that. And whatsapp has been pretty useless for big chat groups such as big neighborhoods and the like. My HOA hasn’t added me or my friends to the neighborhood chat groups historically due to size limitations, which in itself perpetuated a toxic approach from the HOA where only sycophants are allowed into these groups. Most neighbors are left in the dark over decisions and meetings, which is utter stupidity and has 100% been aggravated by whatsapp’s limitations. Doesn’t matter that they’ve implemented alternatives to this, you try to get hundreds of boomers to understand how to use community chats.
Yeah, as someone else mentioned, this step is just for creating a folder. You probably need to get more intimate with the commands you’re running to understand the process better, but I would honestly take a step back and use something more streamlined for these things.
Someone mentioned Proxmox for these things. I would also mention TrueNAS Scale. Both of those make it so that the process of spinning up containers and VMs becomes a lot more streamlined and easy to follow. They also forego a UI on the equipment you’re using, opting for a web UI you’d access from another device instead. Make no mistake, this is a good thing. 99% of things you’ll be wanting to do anywhere will be through web UIs, so that’s where you’ll want to be. The 1% of the time where you’ll be seeing your laptop server’s screen (or an SSH terminal) will be the most painful 1% of your life, and it will be when you misconfigured something and the web UI becomes inaccessible (on that note, also make sure to at least configure SSH access on something so you understand how that works). I’ve had to do this plenty of times with my pfsense box, and as a relative noob to these things as well, having to use nano and vim for editing pfsense configs to revive my server…it’s fucking horrible (sorry vim enjoyers). The good news is, you learn the hard way, but you learn. Try not to have this happen to you, or you’ll be back here soon. Once you’ve had a lot more experience with your tinkering, this will seem less daunting and you’ll be more comfortable debugging directly on your laptop server screen.
TrueNAS Scale, as the name implies, is better suited for when you want to include NAS Capatbilities on your setup. Since you mention things meant for Plex/Jellyfin setups, I’d say you could start there.
However you do mention a laptop, so I’m imagining a very basic setup where you probably have limited space or a couple of USB drives or something. You could, instead, opt for Proxmox. You lose the specific capabilities of creating complex RAID setups that TrueNAS would give you, but it sounds like you wouldn’t be needing those anyways, as they better fit a setup where you have a bunch of disks connected through SATA or PCIe interfaces. Proxmox is a lot more specialized for containers and VMs so it’s probably a good tool to get acquainted with, and might be better suited for a setup where you have just the laptop and maybe a couple of drives to toy around with.
Whichever you choose, make sure to watch YouTube videos about it, read the docs, truly understand what’s going on with that tool first, as well as how to set it up correctly. This will introduce networking concepts to you in the process, as you’ll need to understand how to access the computer through the network with a browser, as well as with SSH. Make sure you don’t ignore networking knowledge. It might seem daunting, or skippable (why bother with local domain names when you can just use the IP and port number?), but a lot of networking concepts are actually rather simple to follow, take a moment on the first few tries but become very easy to reproduce afterwards, and it will make your life easier (yeah turns out, now there’s 20 services and you forgot what ports are for what service…if only you had dedicated time to telling the network that port 69420 was for radarr.localdomain and port 42069 was for sonarr.localdomain).
I’d check out Lawrence Systems on YouTube. They make videos covering networking configs with pfsense and the like, as well as TrueNAS configs, and maybe they’ve delved on Proxmox? Craft Computing, another YouTube channel, for sure teaches about Proxmox. There’s tons of video guides for *arr services, I haven’t looked for platform-specific configs, but I’m sure you can find both videos for Proxmox and TrueNAS Scale configs. Once you get your first one, most other *arr services are very similarly configured (though not all are, some are very quirky).
Another thing you’ll need to understand is how containers work, as well as how to map things from outside the containers into them. Containers are, well, contained, and mappings are how you expose parts of the container to the outside. You’ll probably be guided to map things such as your data and the service’s config files from outside the container to better organize and persist those things. Make sure you understand this concept, where things are on your setup, where they’re getting mapped to in the container, and what this means when it comes to modifying the container (hint: it means you can delete or upgrade the container and things still work exactly as you configured them once your container is back up).
Maybe a controversial advice, but I’d steer clear of the console unless it can’t be helped, since you honestly can do a lot from the UI for the vast majority of things you’ll need to do. If you DO need to use the console, however, I’d bother ChatGPT and documentation for whatever youre doing, to make sure you understand what every command you try does. Things like “sudo mkdir xyz” should be crystal clear to you. In the case of this failed command, for instance, you should be aware that mkdir doesn’t create entire paths, but rather only specific folders. If the preceding folder doesn’t exist, the command fails, so if /home doesn’t exist, nothing else will work. If /home/user doesn’t exist, you’re not going to be creating /jackett_config, and so on. Sudo is also a very powerful keyword, which means whatever follows it is an order from the big boss and must be obeyed. As such, absolutely make sure you understand any command that starts with “sudo”, as those are the ones that can easily set fire to your entire config. If you don’t understand what it’s doing, don’t run it.
While we are on the subject of folder structures, theres no shame in looking up videos and docs explaining the Unix file structure. If youre coming from windows, this is a veeeeery easily confusing bit, and understanding where you are is very helpful.
Hopefully some of my ramblings make sense to you. Hit me up, or hit the community up, if you need more specific guidance. Things can seem daunting at first, especially if you’re new to Unix, but I promise you it becomes easier as you build good foundational knowledge.