Literally everything depends on it. It has to account for a lot of variables. It has to be compatible forward and backward. There’s also a lot of personalities involved in its development and they all need to get along.

So buckle up, it’s story time.

Your computer needs to run software like any other computer does for it to do what you want it to do. There are lots of different parts that do the same thing in different ways and so there are lots of ways to make a computer.

Once upon a time people would write software for specific machines. Anytime a new machine was released, they had to change the software to work on the newer machine. This got real old real fast.

Operating systems come between your software and your hardware. Rather than release a version of your software for each individual type of computer, you just have to release software that works on a specific operating system. So if I sell a program that draws red squares, I would have to release tons of different versions for different machines. That’s expensive and a pain in the ass to maintain. So instead I release my red square program for windows. Now, I describe to windows how to draw that red square with my program and windows handles the task of telling all those different types of computers to do what my program wants it to do.

Microsoft makes windows. Apple makes macOS. But there are others that exist with a different business model. Linux is free and exists under a different philosophy, that a community can share knowledge to replace the locked down and expensive offerings from Microsoft and Apple. To fund this, they may charge for support of the product instead of or in addition to the operating system itself.

When people talk about Linux they are typically referring to a Linux distro that can make up an entire operating system, oftentimes a full replacement of windows or macOS. But technically Linux is just a part of what makes the entire operating system. It’s arguably the most important part, the kernel. Think of the kernel as the core of the operating system. Everything else an operating system does is built on top of the kernel. Linus Torvalds maintains the Linux kernel and he just gives it away.

Linux doesn’t really do a hell if a lot by itself, but a kernel is an incredibly complicated thing to create. So others contribute not just to improving the kernel but making other things that use it to do other things. Because Linus already has a kernel he released for others do what they want with it, it makes things a LOT easier to develop since a huge part of the work has already been done.

All operating systems have kernels and they are the probably the biggest pain the ass part to make. Linus created a simple one years ago and shared it with everyone, who contributed their ideas over the years to enable it to do all sorts of things it couldn’t before.

Now here’s the interesting part: all those people who contributed to developing this thing have day jobs and their employers really don’t want to pay them to reinvent the wheel. So all the big, heavy, expensive, vital stuff that happens behind the scenes that makes our world work needs experienced people to make it work and it doesn’t want to make something only a few people can make work. It would be a catastrophe if the only guy who knew how your shit worked retires, dies, or, dare I say it, asks for a raise. -wilhelm scream-

So if a big company uses Linux, they have an enormous community of talented people they can hire at any time, they aren’t locked into a way of doing things that can request a ransom to continue working (ahem, adobe), and their start up costs are lower.

So who uses Linux? Almost everybody. If it’s online, there’s Linux backing it. Meta (Facebook), Google, Amazon, Apple, even fucking Microsoft uses Linux, and most of the companies using it also contribute back into Linux development because it’s much cheaper than doing it all by themselves.

Now how does this affect you? Linux isn’t just for highly skilled tech professionals running major operations. It’s for that little computer in your desk that just looks at Facebook and internet porn too! Many people are looking for alternatives since their perfectly working windows 10 computer won’t be supported past October anymore and not all of them can upgrade to windows 11. But you can install Linux for free and you’ll be fine.

I’ll take Business majors making technical decisions for 400, Alex.

Build your own. Every out of the box solution can and will screw you.

Yes! Access the webUI, delete the servers it finds then readd them.

So yes and no on that recommendation. If you are just hosting content for local consumption, transcoding is unnecessary since you have the network bandwidth to just throw the data directly to whatever is playing it. So weaker hardware is perfectly fine. If you are doing lots of concurrent streams or there is network access outside the house, the limited bandwidth can become an issue so transcoding suddenly matters and more powerful hardware comes into play.

I have used many ARM SBCs and a few low-power Intel boards like my current N100 and they’ve all been fine. While I generally dislike Intel their quicksync is very useful in media server configurations. If you are going to be doing a lot of live transcodes, I would consider throwing an ARC GPU in there and having jellyfin utilize the transcode capabilities of the Intel GPU instead of the CPU as it can handle more simultaneous streams. Beware the xe driver as there are issues with it in certain configurations. Same with HuC/GuC. The older standard driver is more likely to just work. Jellyfin and the archlinux wiki have great documentation on this.

NVIDIA used to be top tier here but their transcode tech is pretty old by this point and the quality, while acceptable, isn’t the best. Intel beats them. AMD, generally a preference for me, has a terrible media transcoder. Easily the worst quality of all of them. For raw compute and pushing pixels, AMD all the way but for transcode I would pass.

So to summarize: cheap out if it’s just local access. Transcode is pretty much unneeded. If it’s outside the home and/or had many streams at the same time, Intel for the GPU and AMD for the CPU.

Skip the NAS. They all suck. Roll your own server out of literally anything. Install jellyfin. Enjoy

It depends what you want to do with it. What do you want the server to do?

icloud relay doesn’t affect this because it shuts off when my VPN activates and when at home, icloud relay doesnt affect local LAN IP addresses anyway.

But third party apps don’t share a cache.

The VPN was disabled when switching to WiFi already.

AppleTV and MacBook are on Ethernet. Iphone is failing on both WiFi and cellular using WireGuard to VPN into the local network. The logs say the login attempts are actually successful.

I am on iPhone here. I do have the iCloud relay turned on but that doesn’t work on VPNs or local IP addresses.

Nope. I just have it WireGuard into my network but as you can see, it’s acting up over WiFi too.

quadlets let you create a systemd unit file to start and manage a podman container as easily as a locally installed system service.

Jellyfin is HEAVY when doing trickplay scans. But outside of that, it’s really not that demanding. I’m running on an N100 right now but I’ve run it fine on stuff as weak as a rk3399.

Open source is certainly in a great position now but there are some things it’s just not doing that I’m frankly too dumb to do myself. For example, there’s no open source answer to appleTV. The closest thing we have is androidTV and it’s just awful.

I would love to see a TV-centric desktop environment you could run on top of any typical Linux distro. Something implementing live tiles like old windows phone had, a web app that you could access with a smartphone and use to control it like a remote, single-task interface rather than a task-juggling interface we have on normal DEs, sigh. I have a vision I cannot possibly create because that would take incredible skill that I just don’t have to make and I can’t just whine that nobody is making it for me.

Meanwhile, all my Apple stuff works together in a way I generally approve of.

I need to transition away from this at some point but there aren’t always open source solutions for this.

I haven’t learned about kubes yet. I do use and love quadlets though.

I quickly got pissed at synology and QNAP and just started making my own shit. Now when anything fails it’s my own damn fault and I can actually fix it. This sounds bad but it’s actually a much better experience. I learn a lot and have fun. I’m the guy who made all those G4 cube retrofit kits on Thingiverse. It’s been a great distraction for me over the years.

On the subject of containers, learn podman. That’s where everybody seems to be migrating to.

I cant find an RSS feed for my audio sources in pinchflat. where did you find that?