Many clients including the mobile app hide, don’t have or otherwise have the function to add a server via IP broken.

Why would I route through the internet and back to handle local traffic? That’s the reason PLEX isn’t in a DMZ

I have PLEX Pass but haven’t set this up yet, not so sure about exposing my library to their service.

If this is the meta and worth it I will simply use it

I would avoid these at all costs. Things absolutely scream more than any server even you’ll find and you need like 3 nuclear power plants to run them.

It’s a good switch though, if you have a data center and power/cooling budget of a corporation

Easiest way with Portainer is to add it as a volume, then you can add the volumes to your container and add the folder in PLEX.

Point and click easy.

Not that I encourage it, but home users seldom pay MSRP for Windows licenses or at all. Getting around the licensing while ridiculously unlikely to get you busted is a hassle.

The answer is there’s just better options you can install on top of Linux or BSD that are easier to manage, a better experience (nice web panels and not an RDP GUI or clunky thick client) and they have 0 licensing concerns to pay or work around.

I wouldn’t host a share directly from the Linux CLI for some reason I always found this to be kind of a pain but it works, there’s easy solutions like TrueNAS or OpenMediaVault, container based options and you can take the cowards way out with Portainer (that’s what I do) to run tons of really lightweight services.

Windows is fine just not the best unless you’re doing something that works better or needs it