They hate everyone and everything they perceive as not being them. And many secretly hate themselves as well. There is very little other nuance.

Everything here is just starting out and there’s no problem with that. I wouldn’t call myself an animator. But I have done some animations in the past through blender Etc. And develop some small game assets Etc. Which includes texturing/painting unwrapping Etc. I certainly wouldn’t mind some content related more around all that. I know there are a lot of intricacies and techniques even just including blender to make professional looking animations Etc. I don’t know if there’s enough there to supply a whole community. But there is only one way to find out.

Then you’re going to be limited to SMB generally because of windows. If you didn’t need Windows NFS is always the superior choice. But only the pro version of Windows has any NFS support.

Just getting started pretty much any hardware will do. One of the best most accessible ways of doing it is something like a cheap Raspberry Pi computer even two gigabytes of memory is enough to get started. You won’t necessarily need the bigger ones. But generally more tends to be better. Combined with some of the more purpose built OS images for things like open media vault or own cloud. It’s a pretty easy and low bar for entry.

After that it really just depends on your interest, needs, and comfort levels. You could just as easily go into eBay and buy a used $100 E-Waste business Tower. It will give you a bit more swap ability and upgradability where you can add things like 2.5 or 10 gigabit networking if you absolutely need faster. A better method of organizing and mounting storage physically. And a few other amenities. As well as some more options software wise. But if you are really new to this. And you really want to do something a bit more DIY that you control as opposed to something like a Synology Nas. It’s hard to go wrong starting with something like a Raspberry Pi.

Just make sure to keep up on your three two one. Three different copies of your data, on two different types of media, with at least one of them stored off site.

First you need to specify a bit more on what you mean by file server. Are you looking for a network attached storage for home use, or remote use as well? Or are you talking something like a seed box for torrenting Etc. What general software environment will you be working with and what others are you comfortable with.