Your views on distros follows mine. Fedora is my day to day and debian is my server os of choice.

I too started with slackware but I never mastered it. I moved back and forth between windows and Linux eventually settling into debian. I tried different distros and just never loved them. After a while of using Debian I tried redhat. I liked the ecosystem and have been on it for years. I still use Debian for servers without a wm.

Just a quick question have you verified they are supported on the support matrix? I know various hardware on the surface-linix kernel has varying degrees of success.

Another issue others are not addressing is the memory limitations of 32bit software. I am facing it now with a large database that is stuck in a 32 bit world. You may have issues finding 32 bit builds of software as well.

The surface pro 5 is the most supported surface. I have been using it for a few years and it is pretty awesome. Pair it with a brydge keyboard and you have a hell of a laptop. I understand though brydge discontinued their surface keyboard

Another vote for navidrome. I tried substreamer on android ibdid not like the search. I use symfonium easy interface let’s me randomize in many ways.

On a side question anybody have suggestions for automatically creating genre based m3u files? I would like to setup “radio” like stations but adding my music to a playlist.

Just a thought if you are interested. VMware let’s you export the data and then proxmox will read that exported data to a qcow file

I never stopped using it and just got an update today or yesterday for it. I was going on what was posted here. I never meant to start any trouble.

I use Debian as well for all my servers whether they are a VM or container. It is light weight, well supported and dead stable.

It is not necessarily about saving space so much as it is about uniformity. And yes my server is beefy but you get 3 or 4 people all transcoding at the sane time and that beefy server will choke. As I have said I have been collecting for many years with a very large mixed bag of codecs I am just trying to clean up the mess that is my media.

The server that runs the bulk of my homelab does not have a graphics card. My TrueNas Scale server does as well as my desktop. The video’s are stored on the NAS and the remote shares are available on any system. So no graphics card in the server(s) is not ideal but They are beefy servers and still plenty capable of running ffmpeg but the conversion does not have to happen there.

I am not looking to adjust quality of the video or audio just change the codec. I am not necessarily converting ONLY from h264 my media consumption goes back many years and as such is a huge mixed bag of codecs. My videos are not coming exclusively from streaming services.

I am investigating TDARR I know a few people have suggested it. I like the nodes feature so I can use my desktop running a heavy GPU as my 2U server cant really run a graphics card (no power connectors for it). I am using a multi node server with E5 XEON chips.

Totally agree with this and to add everyone’s tastes are different which is why there are so many different distros. It is true there are some tailored for specific things but no one distro is better then another. Any app you install on one can be installed on another

I use fedora kinoite atomic fedora with KDE. I have had no stability issues on a day to day usage for going on 2 years. I agree plasma is plasma regardless of distro but some distros update slower. Fedora is not bleeding edge but does do a pretty good job of staying ahead of the curve. I have been a Linux user since the 90’s and have been around the block a few times with different distros. I always fall back to redhat/fedora for my desktop day to day.

Only media queries I do are to raw images, avi files or raw audio files. Makes life some much easier when the standard is as old as the internet.

I would not say that. I use a very old 13" Dell XPS laptop. I use Code-Server and duckduckgo. I have be known to program on my 7 year old android tablet with a bluetooth keyboard. For the most part I look at docs for JS modules as I write mostly in Python with Flask and use JS for responsiveness. Before anyone suggests something else I have to interface with a VERY old database that I wrote a webservice into through C#. I do realize there are other ways but python is my comfort point and the amount of backend processing makes it easier to use a “real” language. For my purposes it is plenty fast.

There are a few things about jellyfin that I don’t like compared to Plex. First I can’t skip the intro of a show drives me nuts. The second one is it has newly added but not newly released. Other then that it has been really good.

I use navidrome for the streaming and lidarr for downloads. I am not totally thrilled with navidrome as I can not play genres. I want to setup an icecast streaming server with individual “channels” for each genre

I like the question. Nothing would make me change. I use Debian for servers and fedora for my desktop. The distro is not what makes it good or not. The window manager does not change the only think that does change is the package manager and how up to date it is.

I only use Debian for servers because the installer makes it super easier to install without a wm.

I use fedora for my desktop because I like the atomic versions and more up to date packages.