Why did you install it with gnome if you’re not gonna use it? Does jiggling a connected mouse prevent this behaviour? If it is a problem with gnome, as you seem to suspect, run it without a DE. Less overhead and complexity.

I’ve been using easynews/nzbgeek/nzbget with an arr stack on debian and it’s worked well for me. I’m fairly new to usenet, so take this with a giant grain of salt.

This looks really cool! How resource intensive is this? What sort of storage requirements are there for this to be a reasonably reliable method of acquiring media? I’m probably just gonna find out myself. I’ve recently fully switched over to usenet, but this could make torrents pretty compelling again.