[Stephen304]

What requires maintenance though? It's not like there's going to be a breaking change to bittorrent protocol that requires you to update. Most of the pieces of the process are connected just by files in directories (if you don't use a transmission-api compatible torrent client, any client that can watch a folder for .torrent files will do the job), the arrstack picks up completed files from a specific location and drops them where plex can see them. The most important thing to update is the torrent feed aggregator (prowlarr) so new torrent sites will be available, but I just enabled 5 or so reputable-looking sites about 2 years ago and haven't needed to go into the UI since so even then you can just let one version run for a long time and it'll be fine. It's very low-touch after the initial setup. In the years I've used it, the only time I needed to touch it is when I'm impatient and want to check when the digital release for something is, which is usually approximately when stuff shows up on torrent sites - give or take a couple hours for popular content and give or take a day or two for less popular content.

[hot_gril]

I've used Plex by itself with a semi-static video library, and it worked, but even that isn't no-touch. I have to keep a somewhat capable server up first of all, then Plex always has its own random issues. The auto-pirate software, tracking lists, and torrent sources are all additional moving parts without really dedicated support.

It's fine for a hobbyist to deal with, but it's not seamless, otherwise way more people would be doing it. Kinda like how desktop Linux users tend to downplay the rough edges.

[Stephen304]

I'm surprised if you had something like plain plex on a bare debian install break. It's been rock solid ime. And many people do do it, *arrstack has a huge community. I think lots of people experience some sysadmin-type issue and then extrapolate that adding all these extra apps will linearly scale up the likelyhood of breaking. But the extra apps are dead simple and do not cause additional issues ime. There is practically no startup config for most of the stuff (sonarr/radarr/prowlarr) save for a config volume mapping - the docker-compose for those looks extremely bare. And all the addon components are widely updated automatically in the community and I've never so much as seen a complaint of a failed update (I'm not even sure if there are any kind of schema migrations, never seen anybody get a corrupted DB). Sure plex DB does get corrupted for some people but I suspect there is some exacerbating factor since I have never had a plex DB issue - perhaps it's more prone to issues for people using DVR, plex plugins, etc. I just use a stock plex setup with movies and TV shows and the default metadata settings. Never had an issue.

I guess to put it more concisely, adding the *arrstack doesn't really add many (hardly any?) additional failure modes. All the reasons it might break are the same reasons that the plex or the whole system would break. If your system runs out of storage, it might break. If you change the file permissions of some config or data folder, plex might break, and so would arrstack if you chmoded the config files so it couldn't read it. If you can keep plex running on a bare OS, adding arrstack is not really more work other than the initial setup.