Very happy Jellyfin user thinking of switching from Windows to Linux

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• Which distributions should I care about when Jellyfin is the main focus? I don't want anything unofficial or hacked together, just whatever is optimized for the smoothest Jellyfin experience. I'm thinking Ubuntu or Debian but definitely open to suggestions.
  

Anything Debian based.  Primarily because a lot of people use it, thus lots of forum/reddit posts throughout the internet, and pretty much any FOSS project that releases their software in some variety of Linux package will have a DEB package.  Other package types are hit or miss, like Jellyfin not having official RPM packages.

• I see some guides for migrating an existing Jellyfin Library that I can follow, but being totally new to Linux, are there any Windows > Linux suggestions I can implement before starting?
  

If you migrated to Linux, you'd have to start over with Jellyfin.  Not your media, but your users and watch status, etc.  There used to be a migration script someone wrote to go from Windows to a Dockerized Jellyfin, but it hasn't been updated since 10.9 was release and it may not be compatible any more.

• Does networking/firewall/IP address information translate over fairly well?
  

I'm not sure what you're asking here.

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Ninja'd

Thank you! Fair enough, it was a dumb question. I wasted a lot of time troubleshooting my network settings, windows firewall, router, ports, IP address conflicts, and so on when I initially tried Jellyfin for the first time, and it resulted in me getting an entirely new router. I suppose the new router solved the worst of it since the old one was ISP proprietary and caused problems.

Thanks for the input on migrating, I'll skip the script and just start over.  Users, clients and watch status is not a big deal.

Does LMDE sound like a good distribution choice? https://www.linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php