Hi guys, first new thread here 
From what I see on the Youtube channel it looks Tom and like others have done quite a bit with the scale beta. I’m about to fire up a new server for my house. I’m coming from a windows setup with external drives and its mostly going to be a media (plex/channels and the things associated with that) server. I feel like going straight to scale would be better in the long term, but I didnt know if there were any coming gotchas… One item I can’t seem to find an answer on is if scale will always be free like core is. Honestly I would be ok with some cost and I even considered a built server from iXsystems but there servers didn’t seem very transcoding oriented and I obviously saved a lot by building it myself. If anyone is curious about the hardware details just let me know. In my initial testing the current scale version worked for almost everything I tested other than an upgrade issue in the official plex app. It seems like even on core everyone recommends building your own Jail/App which seems a little odd.
Core and Scale and both open source and will be free. Scale is still in beta so you are likely to find some more bugs, much less documentation, and as of the last beta I tested a bit less performance. Because Scale runs docker containers which are more popular than BSD jails you are more likely to find up to date applications.
Yes the longer term benefits and better app support are why I’ve decided to go with Scale. For example with plex transcoding to get that working in a jail on core was a pain but with scale it just worked. BTW I also was told about https://truecharts.org/ as an app provider for Scale and that makes things even better If I can do anything test wise with my system after its up and running to help the community just let me know. I went nuts and went with an alder lake i7 for the processor along with 128gb of ram. I’m doing a dual NVME SSD app pool and an 8x18 TB data pool with raid z1 (5). Initially I just want to get the storage working but plex, channels and then a vm or two will likely be on the list of todo items. Basically I plan to move as many things as possible off my current windows NUC and turn that back into just a home PC.