I want to make a server for hosting media through Jellyfin, and maybe some Nextcloud functionality. I prefer to use containers, but something like TrueNAS’ extensions/plugins sound good as well. This is my first server, so I don’t know what to choose. My possible options are:
- Debian
- Ubuntu
- Fedora
- TrueNAS Scale Which one should I choose? I am fine with using either Docker or Podman. (Edit: The server will be running on an old laptop with a single drive slot.)
I would like to recommend an Ubuntu Server LTS which is almost as solid as Debian in my opinion but with many useful features like nonfree drivers accessible right away and newer packages.
Non-free firmware is included in the Debian installer since Bookworm.
I’ve recently switched from Ubuntu Server LTS to Debian stable because Ubuntu started adding snaps to Server too, and the LTS support was restricted behind machine registration which doesn’t smell good to me.
I haven’t had to deal with any unusual driver support on Debian, probably because I use Intel CPU+GPU for transcoding not Nvidia.
The only external thing I’ve installed was adding the official Docker repo to have the latest Docker, docker-compose-plugin, containerd etc. straight from the source.