TrueNAS did make it easy for me to manage my home lab, but I’m more of a software engineer than a devops. Debian if you’re comfortable with managing that.

Never not going to mention NixOS. :)

You just need to set services.jellyfin.enable = true; in your system configuration and that’s it. It’s not containers, but it’s better than containers.

1. What’s the hardware?
2. Debian, imho

I’m using Debian, with Docker and running Jellyfin, Nextcloud, Navidrome and Wireguard on Containers on my old laptop. So that would be my suggestion.

You could install CasaOS and/or Portainer, on top of Debian if you want an easier way to manage your server and containers.

I love how every answer so far is Debian.

Debian is the correct answer.

Debian or Fedora

Debian if you want something easy and stable, Fedora if you want latest updates and are comfortable with occasional SELinux settings, TrueNAS if you don’t want to spend any time at all setting up disks

Ubuntu if you want infinite dependency hell and 5 minute boot times

Been running the docker on unraid for years in a HP slimline. Rock solid.

I use Ubuntu with no complaints, but Debian is probably better, like others are saying. I wouldn’t use Fedora for this.

Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora should be good (in that order); I’m not very aware on truenas to give an opinion, but it seems it will work just as well from other comments.

I personally use Fedora, and it’s been a solid experience too, with the only gripe bring SELinux. I required a fix for SELinux, but it has worked flawlessly since.

However SELinux might make it annoying to work with containers, so you could consider either switching it off, using another distro or using appropriate configurations to work with it correctly.

Everybody is so quick to suggest Debian (and it’s a fine choice), but Alpine is great for such things, as well. It’s blazing fast, frequently updated, has most packages you could ever want in a server environment (not that it matters if you’re planning on using containers). I’ve been using Alpine for years as my docker host, and not once have I thought “man, I wish it was debian instead”.

in the end it doesn’t realy matter because you plan on running the services in containers. that beeing said, have you thought about arch?

From your list, I would go with Debian. Fedora is amazing but doesn’t have LTS, so you’ll need to update it manually quite often. You can use a script for automatic updates, but I rarely had it working smoothly. Ubuntu is just a joke with repository hell. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone but grandma or a child for the desktop, because of its simplicity. TrueNAS never tried…🤷

I would also look into Alpine and some Arch-based distros.

And yes, use containers, this will save you time eventually.

The only real requirement you have for the Jellyfin server is ffmpeg… But this thing runs everywhere

I tried truenas and was at first enamored but felt quite limited when it came to using docker compose. There are no official ways for using it. Additionally because it uses kubernetes under the hood it’s not as easy to go under the hood to make it work, as it requires knowledge of that in addition to docker. There is an unofficial docker compose package but there is almost no documentation that I could find and it seems to be largely unmaintained nowadays.

The other OS are good candidates, though through my research, if you are after reliability, people seem to prefer Debian with its more robust validation of updates.

I’m here mostly because I’m setting up my own homelab and I’m preparing for making use of Alpine Linux, which has no desktop environment which makes it particularly fast to boot. Additionally it is very robust, has decent documentation and allows for quite some customization but requires to learn a bit about how to make it work. With its barebone structure, it is more secure as it has a smaller attack surface and you only install what you need. Perhaps an alternative for you to consider?

Edit: to keep some sanity while needing to manage your homelab, make sure to put some weight on an os you are familiar with. I have juggled for months between OSs to find what does what I want but it has been a long battle of learning everything from scratch every time. Having tried proxmox, truenas, xcpng, and now hopefully settling with Alpine and zfs. Go the more sane way, any of those first three will work just fine.

Using a debian base (OMV6) with docker. Container is maintained by linuxserver.io
No issues so far beyond myself botching permissions but anyone competent should be able to do it.

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.