Very happy Jellyfin user thinking of switching from Windows to Linux

[Forced]

First let me say I'm very grateful for the creators of Jellyfin and the people who offer helpful advice on the subject of media self hosting in general.
I started out as just an experiment running Jellyfin on an extra Windows 10 PC and it turned out to be so useful, my family uses it all the time.

Now the itch to further myself into self hosting leads to the inevitable switch to something Linux. I don't self host anything besides Jellyfin at the moment, but I'd love to experiment in the future and frankly, I've just always wanted to try Linux at home so here we go.

My questions are:

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

I'm comfortable messing with windows BIOS and whatever it takes to get to a Linux OS, but since I have Jellyfin running so well on Windows + several Roku clients, I'd really hate to break it and start over.

Thanks!

[Host-in-the-Shell]

For Jellyfin, I would most certainly recommend either Debian or Ubuntu if you want something that is officially supported and directly tracked. If it's just your library, and you've enabled the setting to save all your metadata to NFO files, then a new install will read those over pulling new data. That said, remember that if you don't transfer over your databases, you will lose things like users, settings and watch history. Not sure if you can transfer them across operating systems since I've never hosted Jellyfin on Windows, though.

For your last point, if you mean in terms of raw functionality, I'd argue that it's even better specially in terms of modularity and configurability but I am very biased in favor of Linux, obviously. If we're talking in terms of simplicity and easy intuitive GUIs, then no. You will have to contend with the terminal for the most part, with your exceptions being solely the JF GUI.

[TheDreadPirate]

• 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

[xaque]

I was in your same situation about 2 years ago. Made the switch to ubuntu and haven't looked back. While the learning curve isn't that steep, in the begining it can be a bit daunting. I'm big on reasearch and reading a ton before I do anything, and I still do this, but sometimes the best thing to do is jump in and get dirty and just get some experience doing things, don't worry so much about trying to do every perfect the first time. At least that was one of my take away from transitioning.

My other suggestion, and this isn't everyone's opinion, but learn to use docker sooner than later. I really like how you can tinker with things, and if something goes awry you can remove the container and start over. The linuxserver.io images for a lot of services are well maintained and have worked flawlessly for me.

[Forced]

• 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.

---

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

[TheDreadPirate]

Yep. Lots of people use Mint because they prefer the UI.

[Forced]

I was in your same situation about 2 years ago. Made the switch to ubuntu and haven't looked back. While the learning curve isn't that steep, in the begining it can be a bit daunting. I'm big on reasearch and reading a ton before I do anything, and I still do this, but sometimes the best thing to do is jump in and get dirty and just get some experience doing things, don't worry so much about trying to do every perfect the first time. At least that was one of my take away from transitioning.

My other suggestion, and this isn't everyone's opinion, but learn to use docker sooner than later. I really like how you can tinker with things, and if something goes awry you can remove the container and start over. The linuxserver.io images for a lot of services are well maintained and have worked flawlessly for me.

I totally understand just jumping in and finding out, Linux is a huge, broad topic to research and I've definitely been reading myself in circles on it.

Thanks for the tip on Docker. I keep hearing about flatpaks and snaps and docker and containers and God knows what else, so it's nice to have a relevant recommendation.

[Host-in-the-Shell]

Personally, I would advise to learn your way around server administration, bash scripting, and hosting services bare metal first; while docker is super useful and is worth learning for sure, it also abstracts a lot the work that goes into administering services, and could inadvertently create a knowledge gap.

I find that one way to get your hands dirty and learn a lot at once is to host a service like Nextcloud bare metal, since setting it up and updating it is a great teaching tool for many important skills at once, such as hosting a service, dealing with php, database management, cron jobs, and configuring a web server, preferably through a reverse proxy. Of course, follow the best recommended security practices if you intent to host any mission critical files in there. In fact, I still host it the manual way to this day, but behind a virtual machine. I appreciate the practice to keep me sharp, and thanks to the virtual machine I can store snapshots that allow me to destroy and restore at will, which is very useful.

One last piece of advice that may not jibe with everybody is to avoid jumping straight into using portainer after installing docker like 90% of guides will tell you to. I know an easy to understand GUI seems like the most appropriate for a new user, but portainer introduces a lot of pitfalls of its own and abstracts so much of the work involving docker that I think it becomes a crutch rather easily. I wasted around a year with it just to find out that I could do most of the same tasks through the terminal and automate everything even better with docker compose commands, a simple bash script and custom systemd unit. That said, after learning the docker commands and being comfortable with them, if you require a GUI you can use portainer to monitor your containers and access logs. I'd still advise against it administering them instead of using the cli however, as there are many portainer specific issues that are not present otherwise in my experience.