

It would be very tedious to type all of that on my TV, even if I could get mpv on it, and my TV/projector had hardware capabilities to decode the media, not to mention the difficulty in keeping my history between different devices or for different people. You’re clearly not understanding the problem Jellyfin solves, it’s like someone saying “why do we need Lemmy when we can write files on our samba shares” (which btw you should definitely not expose to the internet)

The short answer is because I’m lazy. I might lose 30 min during the system setup instead of 20, and now I have a system that I don’t have to worry about until the hardware gives up.
Arch is a rolling release distro, which means it’s unstable, which doesn’t mean what you think, instead it means that you can update your system indefinitely without worrying about “versions”. For example, if you had Ubuntu 20.04 installed on your server, in may you had to update it to 24.04, and that’s something that can cause issues. And in 2029 you’ll need to go through that again. Arch is just constant updates without having that worry. Which means no library is safe from updates, ergo unstable.
Also the AUR is huge, and I’m a lazy ass who likes to just be able to install stuff without having to add PPAs or installing stuff by hand.
Also there’s the whole customize the system, I use a very particular set of programs that just won’t come pre installed anywhere, so any system that comes with their own stuff will leave me in a system with double the amount of programs for most stuff which is just wasteful.
Finally there’s the wiki, while the vast majority of what’s there serves you in other systems, if you’re running Arch it’s wonderful, it even lists the packages you need to install to solve specific errors.