I’ve got Jellyfin running on an odroid, and it’s pretty solid.

Not sure if you’re the type to need access to your home network while away, but I also use a pi zero as my “login gateway”–I forward just port 22 to it from the WAN, and I have ssh set up to only allow logins with a key. I can set up dynamic port forwarding and tunnel through to my home network, and that pi zero has no other function (so even if I screw something else up on another server, I can still access my network).

Typically a web browser or dedicated app, but it’s open source so there are options. You might be able to stream directly with VLC, not sure.

I’ve seen plenty of people who did the plywood thing, works fine. Weather stripping is recommended if you have lots of bugs (or are otherwise bothered by any intrusions).

If you want to see out that portion of the window, I recommend still using a plywood frame for where the door is, and plexiglass above it.

I tried compiling DoritOS, but apparently I didn’t have the right chip

It depends on the way you like to learn.

If you like to play around with things and look things up as you need, go with a beginner-friendly distro (Mint, ElementaryOS, and Pop!OS are all good options). This gives a more immediate payoff (in that there are lots of fun things to experiment with right away), but you’ll learn things kinda piecemeal.

If you like to learn by reading first, then starting with the absolute minimum and gradually working your way up, something like Arch might be great for you. It’s a much slower process and has a much steeper learning curve, but if you have the discipline for it, you’ll come out with a really solid understanding of how things work.

Most people start with something simple, and venture into the more intimidating waters when they feel comfortable. If you’re not sure, try Mint and go from there. You can always wipe it and install Arch later (if you don’t have anything important on this laptop, you can try lots of different ones without worrying about migrating or losing anything).

As far as I know, the only thing Waterfox does (differently from Firefox) is not collecting telemetry and having uBlock Origin installed by default. I haven’t noticed sites breaking either (at least, any more than they did on FF).

I’m using Waterfox. Been great so far.

Disconnect it from the network, and maybe do a factory reset. Set up some sort of set-top box (a raspberry pi or similar works great, or any old PC).

Yeah, the defacto Arch packages are only compiled for v1, but CachyOS has compiled a lot of the core libraries for v3/v4 (including Wine), which is where I think I’m seeing some improvements. I’m sure the performance would be more optimized by compiling myself, but I don’t have the time or patience for it right now.

No worries, I’m here for it!

It’s a noticeable improvement to me, but probably only marginal to the layperson. I haven’t gotten around to more thorough profiling yet (the included btop++ profiler actually caused my games to crash), but I get the impression my PC is utilizing a lot more of its capabilities (based on performance, fan noise, etc), though maybe I’m just confirming my own biases.

I’m guessing you might get similar gains by compiling manually, but the nice thing with CachyOS is that it’s already compiled (likely with other optimizations as well, I haven’t looked too far into it). I have the technical skills to compile manually, but not the time or energy, so it’s a great solution for me.

Yeah, they were common to Arch. Specifically, Steam would cause the entire system to stutter for a good 30 seconds when starting it up. Found a tip online about it doing something with some extra config files, followed the tip and now it’s working fine.

Even using the CachyOS versions of Proton and Wine libraries (which have the same kind of optimizations applied as the rest of the OS) has worked flawlessly, and my games are smoother than they’ve ever been. Pretty impressed with it overall.

Don’t get me wrong, Mint is great for everyone. I was using it primarily for ages, and I’ve been using Linux for decades as well.

It’s been great so far. Minimalistic in its philosophy (even with a choice of DE, it doesn’t install the typical slew of utility applications and such), and it’s easily the fastest distro I’ve ever used. I’ve had almost zero problems with Steam and Heroic. Overall I think I’m gonna stick with it for the foreseeable future.

Yeah, I’m actually on CachyOS now. I just always point newcomers to Mint because it’s easy and well supported.

I finally switched to Linux as my daily driver when I found it took significantly less time than Win11–mainly driver support. Spent several hours trying to get Windows to recognize all my hardware, Mint had it all out of the box.

There’s an easy way to thoroughly and permanently remove the recall feature.

Install this

The answer also depends on your level of experience and how much you want to learn doing this. You mentioned you haven’t done this before, but are you otherwise comfortable using computers and figuring things out? Are you familiar with Linux and/or the command line? In addition, are you hoping to tinker around and learn a lot from this, or are you more concerned with just setting it up so you can use it?

There are options for all levels of expertise and technical interest, but I recommend starting with any hardware you already have or can aquire for cheap/free (especially if you’re hoping to tinker and learn more). As another commenter suggested, finding an old desktop or laptop and putting a NAS operating system on it would be a great starting project. Then once you play around with it, you’ll know if/where you want to spend some cash on something better. If you don’t have old PCs laying around, check on whatever you use for local buy & sell listings, you can probably pick up something for pretty cheap.

If you’re mostly looking to play around and you don’t have any extra hardware, you can also try things out in a virtual machine (download VirtualBox), which will let you learn without any monetary investment.

I’m using my old desktop from 2010. There’s no such thing as a server that can “do it all”, but any computer from the last 10 years would probably be a fine place to start. The more you do, the more likely you’ll be to hit some sort of performance limit, and by that time you’ll know more about what you actually want.

In short, find old cheap/free hardware and start playing around.

If you feel most familiar with Debian, I recommend looking at Mint. It has great compatibility and is otherwise easy to use, and it handles GPUs well (including Nvidia). In terms of hardware, I’ll agree with the others here–used is the way to go, you’ll get a lot more for your money than buying new.

That being said, you can also look for clearance and/or refurbished PCs. This one would probably be powerful enough.

Doubtful. Without Linux running the majority of the internet, I doubt the desktop scene would look the same as it does today.