Edit2: OK Per feedback I am going to have a dedicated external NAS and a separate homeserver. The NAS will probably run TrueNAS. The homeserver will use an immutable os like fedora silverblue. I am doing a dedicated NAS because it can be good at doing one thing - serving files and making backups. Then my homeserver can be good at doing whatever I want it to do without accidentally torching my data.
I haven’t found any good information on which distro to use for the NAS I am building. Sure, there are a few out there. But as far as I can tell, none are immutable and that seems to be the new thing for long term durability.
Edit: One requirement is it will run a media server with hardware transcoding. I’m not quite sure if I can containerize jellyfin and still easily hardware transcode without a more expensive processor that supports hyper-v.
It’s mostly for running media servers like jellyfin.
If the software you want to run has flatpak then I imagine you can try out Fedora Silverblue, Jellyfin do have a flatpak.
Personally I run my Jellyfin on a virtual Debian Bookworm server with transcoding off, my Jellyfin clients don’t need the help.
I always clone my Jellyfin server before apt update && apt upgrade to be able to rollback.
Oh, and my NAS (network attached storage) isn’t on the same machine, my Jellyfin server use Samba and /mnt/media/libraryfolders, so cloning it is quick and easy.
Is there a performance impact on the jellyfin server by having the NAS on a separate machine? How long does it take to serve a 20gb rip of a bluray?
The network isn’t a bottleneck in my system.
I don’t have any 20gb bluray rips as I’m satisfied with the quality of a 5-8gb 1080p.
I don’t notice a delay when starting it, it’s just a datastream without transcoding.