Need adsvise on the EASIEST way to get jellyfin up on my network.

[whathaveibecome]

Hello there. New to the forums.  I am pretty good with computers but I am more of a hardware and networking guy then a software guy.  I have an old Dell with a core i7-7700 that I have been struggling to get jellyfin going on. My problem isn't really so much with jellyfin as it is the seemingly overly complex operating systems required to setup in order to have jellyfin running.  My computer specs are:

core i7-7700
16gb ram
16gb optane nvme for OS
3 4tb barracuda in raid z1
128gb sata ssd for transcoding buffer
1tb sata for backups and misc
10gbe nic for my 10gbe network

This should be a reasonably OK spec computer for streaming 1 or 2 jellyfin streams at one time as well as very occasional samba file server usage.

I just have 2 goals. I want this Dell computer to run jellyfin with transcoding enabled, and have samba shares. That's it.  Literally nothing else. 

I have tried installing Debian as the native OS, which is also my operating system of choice for pc's and laptops. I know debian pretty well, have been using it since 8.0 (it's now on 13 I think).   I figured I could install debian and use it for samba, and then install jellyfin on top of that. And that worked! Except I spent over a week and a half trying to get samba up and running. It was amazingly confusing. I followed countless how to guides on samba/debian. I just couldn't get it to work. I guess I lack the technical skills. 

So I tried openmediavault for samba and was able to get samba up and running, but could not get jellyfin working with transcoding. I could get normal jellyfin working so long as I didn't try to transcode. Spent days working on that too and finally gave up. It's just too hard for me.

OK onto truenas. Holy hell Truenas is complex. Some how I managed to get samba up and running but I can only see one of my 2 shares for some reason. And just like OMV, I got jellyfin working but not with transcoding. 

I guess I am just frustrated and don't know what to do next. My real issue is that linux user permissions seem wayyyy too overly complicated for a simple private server. It's basically getting beyond my ability to comprehend.  I'm not really sure what to do here. I loathe the idea of giving up. I really_really_want to get this working. But I can't spend a week or more learning about linux acl's and permissions and then there's docker. OMG....   docker is well, interesting to say the least. 

I guess what I am asking is, is there an easier way one of you guys know about?  Maybe there's an operating system that has jellyfin and samba pre installed and setup that I don't know about?  I figured I would throw a hail mary pass and post on the jellyfin forums to see if anyone had an idea.

[TheDreadPirate]

If you only want Jellyfin and Samba, it is pretty simple on plain Debian. The one thing I suspect you may not have done is add firewall rules.

Personally, I prefer distros that do NOT have the fancy UIs since I find they get in the way when doing more complex things.

If you want to go back to Debian, or Ubuntu, I can help you get things rolling with both Jellyfin and Samba. I can provide you with some example smb configs and the steps to allow remote users access.