Amassing a media library is simple enough, and software like jellyfin can pull in media info and make your media streamable on various devices with a polished UI.

However, finding good quality (in terms of merit) movies and shows is difficult.

Maybe start with movies critics or a movie discussion platform like letterboxd to see what others are watching/rating movies.

In terms of telemetry, free software has the advantage over the proprietary counterpart.

It’s a lot more complicated to hide telemetry without the user knowing in free software.

You could always use a network tool, like iftop, to see network traffic on your PC. That could be a way too see if a program is phoning home. But you’ll probably want to use a suite of tools.

I’m not familiar with e/OS/ but fairphone recently released their phone to the US market with this OS preinstalled.

+1 for Jellyfin. GPL licensed software so nice.

If your on a budget, an older Thinkpad is a good choice. I picked up a X220 with a charger and spare battery off of Craiglist a year ago for $60.

Ended up going with Coreboot with a SeaBIOS payload and Debian OS.