Selfhosted

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

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

Whatever you're most comfortable with. It's a simple enough ask that you can do it in Ubuntu server or Debian quite easily.

I would recommend at least using docker but you don't have to.

Truenas isn't very forgiving with drive configuration. I really like it but it isn't great for randomly adding drives here and there. Unraid might be a better choice for home usage. I have never had good luck with their built in app stuff but I've also never really tried past it not doing what I want.

I run truenas with a ubuntu server vm and docker some stuff in that. I also run proxmox on another server and a dev server running Ubuntu server that I docker things on.

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.

I use RHEL/Rocky 8 for all my home server stuff mostly because i like my home server stuff boring and stable.

Since you were considering TrueNAS, maybe consider something like Debian/Ubuntu + CasaOS. That will give you a good base and webui to work with.

It's not going to be a lean as it could be but it should give you enough guard rails and hand holding to get you started. Then you can figure out the rest of your needs from there. If you don't like it you can always wipe it and try again with something else.

I'd stay away from the TrueNAS, Unraid, Proxmox, etc. mostly due to your hardware and that it's your first home server.

They're not bad at all, but a lot of the stuff is abstracted from you and since you're more than likely going to want to tinker with it having a standardized base install with a distro that has a lot of documentation is going to be very helpful.

There's a jellyfin docker container. Get that going and then the underlying OS becomes important

I went with bodhi.

Not seeing anyone suggesting unRAID… it’s perfect for this kind of thing (from experience). VMs, LXC, Docker & flexible storage options.

Has its own App Store built in as well🤷‍♀️