I've been experimenting with Jellyfin on my Windows desktop and want to repurpose an old Windows 10 laptop as a permanent Jellyfin server. The laptop is a bit outdated, slow, and not really functional with Windows anymore, so I'm looking for an easy and lightweight way to run Jellyfin on Linux. I've never really used Linux at all, aside from a brief stint with Edubuntu in high school. The main goal is to connect to a NAS for storage and host Jellyfin. Any recommendations would be greatly appreciated!
6 Answers
I’m using a 15-year-old SFF Optiplex as a Jellyfin server with a first-gen Intel i7 920 and originally 8GB of RAM. It also runs other applications like Sonarr and QbitTorrent. I’m on Debian with KDE and it runs fine for me. I upgraded it later to 32GB RAM and added some storage, so it’s become my go-to for light gaming too!
Just a heads up, you might run into file permission issues. After you install Jellyfin, a user named 'jellyfin' will be created which needs access to your media files. You’ll want to add this user to the same group as your main user. A quick search online should make it clear how to do this. Don't forget to restart your system afterwards. I've had a smooth experience using Ubuntu as my main OS!
I've had great luck running Jellyfin on Ubuntu server, and it works fine on my 2015 computer. Just keep in mind, it doesn't have a GUI, so you’ll be using SSH for everything after the initial setup. Also, setting up SMB allows you to have a local Dropbox-like setup for your storage needs!
For what it's worth, I've only used Jellyfin on Linux. It runs smoothly on Linux Mint, even on a decade-old Dell with an i5 processor. It might be worth considering if you're looking for a more user-friendly Linux experience!
If you're looking for a lightweight option, Debian without a GUI is a fantastic way to go. It's really beginner-friendly, plus there's tons of community support. Anything designed for Ubuntu will generally work on Debian too since Ubuntu is built on it!
I actually host Jellyfin inside an LXC container on my Proxmox node. I have a GPU passthrough for transcoding and it's running fine with just a couple of cores and a minimal amount of RAM. Trust me, you don't need a super powerful setup, even for 4K transcoding!
That's really good to know! I was worried I'd need a lot of horsepower for transcoding.