Running .exe remotely

Yes.

Sometimes Windows apps are fussy about being installed into Program Files so they can access other stuff they've put there, but if you can run the .exe from a USB then it's obviously already happy without needing to be installed.

Some older apps may want the network share mapped as a drive letter, ie it might not like running from \\servername\sharename\myapp.exe but if you 'Map Network Drive' to X: it would be X:\myapp.exe which shouldn't cause problems.

Theo

Also to add, you'd need to explicitly share the USB stick on the Linux server, it won't happy automatically. eg if it gets mounted at /media/david/MYUSBSTICK then you'd need to create a new share of that location using Samba or whatever software you're using to share over the network.

Theo

If your Windows machine is short of memory and needs to do paging, it will probably page the code from the USB stick, which won't be very efficient.

I cant actually see how that is an answer to his question...

Yes, a linux server with an EXE on a USB stick exported by SAMBA etc will (in principle) work just fine. Unless it tries to store its working data on that USB stick which will be somewhat slow.

Once loaded into memory the program no longer cares where it cane from

But it sorta raises the question of why, with a Linux server available, you don't put the program onto that, instead.

I cant remember if SAMBA follows symlinks and crosses partitions so e,g. if you already export /home/MyShit you couldn't mount the USB as /home/MyShit/MyUsb

AI, she sez

"Samba can export directories that span multiple partitions or filesystems, provided they are mounted within the same directory tree on the host server. Samba serves the files as presented by the operating system, making it unaware of underlying partition boundaries.

Cross-Partition Capability: If you have /data on one partition and mount a second disk at /data/extra, sharing /data via Samba allows users to access both disks seamlessly."

So you could do lots of symlinkery and black magic to get your plugin drives to magically appear in an already exported partition

NFS is much more fussy

If you are new to Linux - then check out Webmin. It's a browser based app that allows you to change configs via a GUI.

It's FOSS.

Thanks to all who have answered. I am happy that it seems possible.

To answer other questions:

- The USB stick has yt-dlp on it which I currently take from the PC and plug into my telly.

- The Linux machine would be a Raspberry Pi with OpenMediaVault on it as a media server.

- I know next to nothing about computing. Whilst looking like a genius to various family members, I am absolutely aware that I can only operate some applicatons. I am not a computer user in any sense of the technical sense.

- I had a Raspberry PI 2 running OMV and it worked lovely until the HDD went for a burton. The 100 Mb/s ethernet was a bit painful for transfering downloads.

- I would endeavour to use a Pi 5 or similar with gigabit ethernet for faster transfers.

- the YT-DLP USB stick would stay as a stick just incase the continual reading, writing, and erasing shortened the life of the HDD for the rest of the media. I am cautious about this as the previous set-up was one

- I am under the impression that a large USB memory stick (128 GB or greater will be good for longevity as they apparently do wear levelling)

- The Pi 2 will be re-purposed as a music server.

- I don't have much going on in my life.

Cheers.

I don't really understand this, but the PC has 16 GB of RAM if that's of any relevance.

Brilliant!

It requires a Java thing which also sits on the USB drive in the same directory. Seems happy enough.

Noted, cheers.