If I had to put a name I would say customizability and ease of use. I dual booted for several years, it started as Linux was my programming OS and everything else was on Windows, but organically I started to spend more time on Linux and at some point I noticed Windows had become my gaming system, anything else I was doing in Linux. I fiddled with Wine and some games I could get to run on Linux so I only had to reboot for some games. Then Humble Bundle gave me a few games for Linux and I found other ones that offered Linux builds like Project Zomboid and I decided “you know what? I don’t even game all that much, between Humble Bundles and Wine I can probably get enough games to keep me entertained and I don’t have to keep dual-booting” so I nuked windows from my system and a short while later Steam came to Linux consolidating my choice.

So yeah, it wasn’t that I chose Linux it was that using both for long enough pulled me to one side. I can’t tell you exactly what pulled me, but whenever I try to use Windows everything seems so clunky and rigid that I think that played a large role. I remember several times when I had issues on one OS I would jump to the other, the issues in Linux were mostly self-inflicted (even though I didn’t knew it at the time), whereas the Windows issues were random, unpredictable and unfixable with time the Linux ones became fixable and even predictable.

Echoing what others have said, Immich hasn’t had breaking changes in a while. That being said it’s one of the services I keep it on a pinned version and read release notes before updating.

Yeah, even when jumping minor versions they tend to spend a few days/weeks pushing patches, I’ll wait a bit before updating.

I’m not saying its not possible, I am disagreeing that his is a valid point as an argument for “the distro does not matter” statement.

But when the question is between Ubuntu and Kubuntu you can “convert” between them very easily. Not to mention that the fundamental difference between all Debian based distros is the version of the packages they offer, so you can very easily jump between them expecting most things to be the same.

These are not the only reasons, but good reasons WHY the distribution matters. BTW I also think that some distributions are technically superior for certain use cases. In example CachyOS is more up to date, has optimizations even on Kernel level, compared to an old Debian distribution that is focused on stability. These are technical differences that matter, for whatever you want to achieve. It’s not just a personal taste.

Yes, that matters for you, it doesn’t matter for someone who just wants something to use. That contributes to the decision paralysis of switching to Linux, when we say distro doesn’t matter we’re trying to remove that hurdle, because for the average guy that will just use his computer the difference between Debian and CachyOS is the name. Someone without experience in Linux doesn’t understand what stability means, they think it means the system won’t crash so they always try to use stable distros and get frustrated because they’re out of date, or alternatively they think they want bleeding edge until it cuts them. And that’s the crux of the issue, when we make a distro choice, it matters because we understand the differences, when a new user is trying to pick their first distro they’re essentially throwing a dice, it doesn’t matter where it lands, it matters how they feel about it.

It’s hard for us to put ourselves back in the shoes of someone just getting started,

They are thetorical questions

But they’re not, they might be to you or me, but for someone without Linux knowledge they’re very real questions. I have answered some form of some of those from people in the past.

If they don’t understand the differences, then they SHOULD research and debate until they do.

Oh really? Would you mind telling me what’s the difference between Pop, Ubuntu and Mint in a way that would matter for someone who doesn’t understand anything about Linux?

Choosing a random distribution and hopping until they understand is not only waste of time and resources, it will teach them wrong lessons this way.

Having to research what to use before understanding the difference will teach them nothing and make them give up before starting.

I for myself researched for months before I landed on Ubuntu in 2008 as the default, to replace Windows XP. Then I kept using it for… I think 15 years straight or so (forgot the exact numbers).

Yeah, but 2008 was a very different playing field than it is today. 2008 we were almost unanimously recommending Ubuntu or Mint, every forum you asked, every thread you found online it would have been essentially the same recommendation. It’s easy to make the decision then. Today if you open 4 different articles from 4 different sites you will likely get at least 4 different answers to which distro you should choose. And theyake it seem like it’s this big important decision that you have to get right the first time around, that’s the mentality we’re trying to fight.

I don’t like the analogy of “clothes” or someone else with “colors”. Distributions are extremely complex and there is way more work and knowledge involved, they have way more impact and dependencies.

An expert in clothes might tell you the same about them, and that’s what you’re missing, you are an expert, to you the difference between Mint and Pop is concrete and mensurable, to someone who doesn’t understand what I package manager is it’s just vague words without any meaning.

And to your point if someone asks me “do clothes matter?” i will say “off course”. Not just to contradict you, but because I think clothes do matter depending on how they fit to me, to the situation I am and how nice it feels, how it looks and so on. Even on practical side, if it rains or if I want to swim. While I don’t like this clothes analogy, I still wanted answer that question you assumed I would say “no”.

Cool, now explain to an alien who walks around naked why this jean and t-shirt is different from that jeans and t-shirt.

Just because it does not matter for most, does not mean that it does not matter at all.

And if the alien above asked you what clothes to wear to go to the supermarket, you would just say “any jeans and t-shirt would do”, only to have dozen of other people telling him “use this shirt and this pants”, “No, that’s a bad color combination for your eye color, use this one instead”, “No, that show is hard to lace, use this outfit instead”, “You’re not really dressed unless you wear a custom tailor suit”, etc, etc…

They don’t know it does not matter.

Precisely why we tell them it doesn’t.

I think there are choices better suited to them, even if they don’t know and say it does not matter - it does, they just don’t know it yet.

Yes, exactly, but they won’t know until they understand, and you won’t know until they understand, and they won’t understand until they do, and no amount of reading will make them understand. The initial choice between 5 different “noob” friendly distros doesn’t matter, the understanding you get from that will guide your next step, trying to take the next step before knowing where you’re standing is a recipe for disaster

I see often people say that the distro you are using doesn’t matter.

For certain things it doesn’t. Usually this is brought up in the context of someone wanting to choose between 5 possible valid alternatives to start using Linux, and the advice is “it doesn’t matter, just pick whichever and when something annoys you you might understand the difference”

One can turn any distro into another. And I do not agree with that.

You can disagree all you want, it’s 100% possible, stupid, but possible.

If that was true, why do we even have so many distributions?

Because philosophy matters. You don’t pick a distro because it’s technically superior or because it has features others don’t have (with some exceptions like NixOS). You pick a distro because it’s philosophy speaks to you, be it “I aim to be user friendly” or “I aim to follow KISS”. This is why for the most part distro doesn’t matter for newcomers, because they’re looking at 5 examples of “I aim to be user friendly and…” distros.

• … why distro hop?

Because I want to try something different and see how I feel about it.

• … why don’t you use Ubuntu then?

I did, for a long time, then I decided that building my system up was easier than tearing it down. If I was using Plasma or Gnome I wouldn’t have switched probably.

• … why don’t you recommend Archlinux to a newcomer?

Because Arch philosophy is KISS, meaning you have to build everything from the ground up and you’re expected to understand the steps and read the manual. This is why I believe distros like Manjaro or CachyOS cause issues, they remove the initial hurdle of Arch but don’t change the core philosophy, making them ticking time bombs for people who don’t know their way around Linux.

• … why don’t you use Kali Linux as a server?

You do you, my servers don’t usually need all of the extra tools a distro with the philosophy of “I’m a pen tester tool” has.

• … why don’t you use Batocera or SteamOS as your daily driver?

Because usually I want my daily driver to do computer stuff, and those distros philosophy is “I’m a gaming console”

• … why do you trust a community distro more than a corporate distro? (or vice versa)

I don’t trust either more inherently than the other, I trust distros that have a track history of good behavior.

I don’t think that distros only matter to newcomers. Maybe it matters for experienced users even more.

Distros matter, they tell a lot about what you’re trying to accomplish. But most newcomers are debating for days whether they should use Ubuntu, Pop, Mint, Fedora or CachyOS, and realistically they’re unlikely to even understand the difference between those. Think on distros like clothes, if you’re just going to the market it doesn’t matter what clothes you wear, if you’re going to a job interview it matters, and if you’re going to do something very specific like swimming some clothes are simply better than others. But if someone asks you “do clothes matter?” You will probably reply no, because for most stuff you do as long as you’re not wearing clothes with holes in them you’re fine, but you can tell a lot about people by the clothes they decide to wear. It’s a similar thing for distros, for most stuff it doesn’t matter, for certain things it’s important for others it gives some information and for some specific cases it makes a huge difference, but for the most part it’s a personal choice.

Glad you solved it yourself, but I’m still struggling to understand what happened, how did you have them all in a single folder if the filename for docker compose has to be one of a few predetermined things? I mean, you could have them all in a single file, which makes some things easier, but then you wouldn’t have been able to move them into individual folders. Would you mind explaining what happened there so that if someone else in the future has the same issue they might find the solution here?

Also, note that even if someone had given you an example of a working docker file you would still have to configure the service. For future reference, this site is great and has working examples of docker compose files for a lot of services, e.g. https://hub.docker.com/r/linuxserver/radarr

Finally, welcome to the club, sorry you had a bad experience the first time, it’s hard for us to know what’s obvious and what isn’t: https://xkcd.com/2501/

Pros

I get to own my system. I get to do what I want, if something is not to my liking there’s likely a way to make it work like how I want.

Cons

I have to own my system. If something breaks I have to fix it, if something doesn’t work I need to figure it out.

and what if any do you miss from windows?

Expect things to work. Linux is a minority of users, any manufacturer or dev HAS to make their products work for Windows, so much so that Windows users don’t even consider the possibility that something is not made for Windows.

Plex server doesn’t need to be “portable”

Strongly disagree, I’ve switched my media server several times in the past decade for a multitude of reasons, having things in docker has allowed me to do this seamlessly.

Also you’re ignoring all of the other benefits of running in docker, from isolation to automation.

and running it in docker definitely doesn’t make it easier.

Plex is the only self-hosted service that is purposefully trying to block you from being ran in docker. All other things are just much easier to run in docker, that’s part of the appeal, reproducible builds eliminate the “it works on my machine” errors.

There absolutely are programs that make sense to run in docker, but Plex server isn’t one of them.

Why do you think it doesn’t make sense? Does Jellyfin make sense to you to run in docker? Why are they different?

Also, Plex only supports Ubuntu and CentOS, none of which I run on my server, so the only OFFICIAL way to run Plex is Docker.

There’s zero need to run anything in docker, it just makes things easier and portable.

What Plex does is closer to having an embedded tailscale client, you can access Jellyfin remotely with tailscale for free, but OP specifically asked for no VPN.

That being said, I’m not opposed to Plex charging for that service, even a tailscale like server costs something to maintain. My gripe with Plex is that it purposefully shoots itself in the foot to force you into their paid service, i.e. it actively tries to isolate itself so you can’t access it remotely, which means that it can’t run inside a docker container unless you give it network host access, otherwise it only considers other docker containers locals and doesn’t let you watch your own content from another machine in the same network.

Because clients would probably fail if there’s an authentication layer on front that they’re not expecting.

https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/5415 nothing too serious, but here you go

IIRC Envy clients can connect to Jellyfin, it’s part of the reason why they don’t change the API despite security issues.

Except most people have almost the same structure because of media organizers like radarr/sonarr. At the very least they should hide that behind a setting to not require auth (since the header should be there for most clients) so only people running an old client would be affected. They could also add an extra salt to that hash or something similar.

I agree, it’s not critical, but it shouldn’t be hand waved either. And like I said, security is relative, I would argue for most people this is fine, but I still think this should be taken more seriously.

Secure is relative, you should be aware that jellyfin itself has security issues https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/5415 most of which are harmless, but at least one is fairly serious and allows people to watch your media without authentication, and adding an extra layer of authentication on the proxy would likely cause issues with clients.

That being said, if you’re okay with those security issues what I would do is have a cheap VPS, connect both machines to tailscale, and have something like Caddy on the VPS to do the forwarding.

So? Jellyfin only needs 8096, the other two are https and lan discovery, you can also add 1900 for DNLA. On the other hand Plex has 8 additional configurable ports for other stuff, but that’s besides the point because it requires network_mode: host otherwise it pretends it can’t be seen.

1. Copy the compose.yaml from https://docs.linuxserver.io/images/docker-jellyfin/#user-group-identifiers and adjust, e.g.:

services:
  jellyfin:
    image: lscr.io/linuxserver/jellyfin:latest
    container_name: jellyfin
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
      - TZ=Europe/Madrid
    volumes:
      - ./config:/config
      - ./media:/media
    ports:
      - 8096:8096
      - 8920:8920
      - 7359:7359/udp
    restart: unless-stopped

2. Run docker compose up -d

3. Navigate to http://<IP>:8096

4. Follow the wizard to create a user and libraries.

5. Profit

Steps for Plex:

1. Copy the compose.yaml from https://docs.linuxserver.io/images/docker-plex/?h=plex#umask-for-running-applications and adjust, e.g:

---
services:
  plex:
    image: lscr.io/linuxserver/plex:latest
    container_name: plex
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
      - TZ=Etc/UTC
      - VERSION=docker
    volumes:
      - ./config:/config
      - ./media:/media
    ports:
      - 32400:32400
    restart: unless-stopped

2. Run docker compose up -d

3. Navigate to http://<IP>:32400

4. Create an account with Plex, give them your email and create a password with the specific requirements they impose. Agree with their use policy and confirm the pop-ups about ads and such.

5. You can now watch Plex media. Clicking your media will only have a link to https://www.plex.tv/media-server-downloads/

6. Look everywhere to figure out where to add your local media and give up.

7. Look in Google and no one has this issue.

8. Spend a few hours trying and give up.

BTW, the issue there that took me months to figure out is that while Plex documentation says that you only need to expose that port, it only works in network host mode, so unless you give it full control of your network it just refuses to work.

I have set up both. Honestly Jellyfin was MUCH more easy to setup because Plex requires a very specific way to setup the network otherwise it craps its pants and refuses to work on LAN.

But after figuring out those pain points, both are set and forget. The main differences are privacy concerns vs wide access outside of LAN and on more devices.

Yup, but all that being said I still run Jellyfin and have no intention of switching to Plex. And while I would like to see them fix these issues, I understand (in part) why they won’t and I’m okay with my tail scale setup. Also the vast majority of issues are very minor, but the ability to watch any media without login is so major that I think it’s worth bringing up every time someone mentions exposing Jellyfin online.

Agree, I don’t consider most of them a risk, but I do like to bring this to the attention of people who are exposing Jellyfin to the web so they can make an informed decision.