Intel 11th Gen i7 laptop as server?

[chrima]

I'm using an old HP laptop with an older then 11th Gen i7 for my mediaserver and I'm happy. Jellyfin (and others) are running in a docker container.
Attached is a 8TB USB-disc for the media files.

I would not advice Windows as OS.

My setup:

OS: openmediavault (a debian 12 based NAS OS with nice web-gui. Nearly no need to use cli)

Docker container:
  - jellyfin
  - plex (yes it runs side by side)
  - tvheadend (DVB-T2, IP-TV, DVR)
  - telerising (generates .m3u-files from my IP-TV provider)
  - xteve (m3u proxy)
  - photoprism
  - traefik (reverse-proxy for tls)
  - calibre (E-Books)
  - dozzle (view container logs in browser)
  - portainer-agent (connect to central portainer instance)

The containers for jellyfin, plex and photoprism are all run by the same user
For each media type I setup a smb/cifs share, to allow clients to push media files to the mediaserver(s).
Jellyfin, plex and photoprism use the same files for their libraries.
The GPU (Intel Kabylake (Gen9) is activated, so hardware acceleration is used by jellyfin. This was the only part where I had to use the commandline...
The load average is at 0.5. I'm planning to add a nextcloud instance to push fotos and videos from mobile devices to jellyfin, plex and photoprism.

Have fun!