First Home Media Server Questions

[TheDreadPirate]

1. It definitely needs a GPU. That Ryzen CPU will be struggling if you have more than 2 users that need transcodes. If you have an old 10 series Nvidia GPU laying around, that would suffice. I you don't have any spare GPUs, I'd suggest getting an Intel Arc GPU. They are cheap and fantastic for transcoding.

2. I have no idea where you found something that said that Ubuntu isn't the best. There are some vocal Linux purists that don't like some of the snap related things they are doing. But, practically speaking, for the average user Ubuntu is perfectly fine. We generally recommend any of the various Debian or Ubuntu based distros. Mainly because they are so widely used that there is a ton of documentation and we even have a "one liner" install script for jellyfin. But only for Debian/Ubuntu based systems.

3. If this is only ever going to run Jellyfin and nothing else, keep it simple. Skip any virtualization buzzwords tech tubers like to preach in their jellyfin tutorials, like Proxmox or Docker or Unraid. Install your Linux distro of choice, install Jellyfin, done (mostly). Docker and VMs have their place. But too many people have 1 VM or 1 Docker container setups. Lots of extra configuration for no benefit.

If those Seagate hard drives are left over from a, I'm assuming, Windows gaming PC make sure to reformat them to ext4. Assuming you don't have any left over data on them. NTFS does not handle permissions the same way as ext4 and when used on a Linux system it can complicates things.