Hey everyone! I’m finally fed up with Win11 and the bullshit that comes with it for the PC it’s on.
It’s being used as a Jellyfin+arr stack, qbit, Immich, and gaming PC for the living room.
I’m currently in the process of backing up all my important info and am doing research on which distro to use.
I don’t mind tinkering, but for this PC, stability is key. I don’t want to have to go in and update it every week… I want this one to work with minimal maintenance on my part.
I’d likely update it a few times a year, knowing me.
A few hardware specs:
MSI mobo (I’ve learned that UEFI can be a pain), 10600k, 2070 gpu, and will have a pool of 3x8tb drives that I would like to have in raid5 (or something similar) for storage (movies, TV shows, and Immich libraries), the OS will have its own drive, and I have a separate SSD that I have been using to store programs, games, yml’s for docker, and other such things that get accessed more frequently, but aren’t crucial if lost.
I’ve kinda narrowed it down to either Bazzite or CachyOS.
I’ve heard that Bazzite can be a little more locked down, which I’m not a fan of, but CachyOS has features I will likely never touch (schedulers, kernels, etc…).
I don’t want an upkeep heavy OS. I’m moving away from windows for that reason. Win11 has been a nightmare for me with constant reboots and things not loading up until after I log in. Not to mention driver conflicts and all the other BS that’s come with it.
So… What say the hive mind? Is Bazzite going to be too tinker-proof, or is CachyOS just way too much work? Or do I have it all wrong with my perception of both?
Thanks!
Ps: this will be my first full commit to Linux. I’ve dabbled in the past and am no stranger to CLI… So this will likely be a stepping stone into getting my primary PC onto Linux. Go easy on me lol
I was running everything through Docker, so that will be a must. Jellyfin was on its own executable, but that was because something with transcoding, I think, wasn’t working with docker. I don’t remember now what the problem was, but apparently the issue didn’t exist in the Linux docker version. It was isolated to windows.
If it’s not in the base image, there will be a way to add it, yea?
Somewhere else in the thread someone mentioned Bazzite not being ideal for servers, but I’m still parsing through all the replies, so I’m unsure how accurate that is.
Docker and Bazzite are not plug-and-play. That being said, bazzite comes with podman, and podman can create a docker environment.
But…I am not an expert here by any means. Do not take this as a green light to just go ahead and pick bazzite. Bazzite is my daily driver and I use podman to run arch and Ubuntu CLI programs as well as an ollama local llm server, but I know NOTHING about docker, I just have seen the docs and thought I would share.
These Linux Docker images may be of use to you for setup.
On Linux, running Jellyfin through docker with GPU acceleration works fine, yes. But you need some options/flags to pass access to the GPU to the inside of the container. Guides and/or docker tutorials exist and should contain that, as that’s basically the default setup these days.
As for Bazzite and Docker (I just checked), no it isn’t part of the base image and you can’t easily install it. That’s the downside of an immutable distro. I think podman is available, which is compatible and FOSS, but there may be caveats to using that. There is a bazzite version called bazzite-dx intended for developers, so that one would probably work fine for you out of the box. There shouldn’t be any real downside to using that compared to the mainline image, apart from being slightly larger cause all dev tools are installed, but do check that. My practical experience with Bazzite is limited.
My real recommendation is: just try it. Slap in a small/cheap SSD (~20 bucks) instead of whatever you got in there now, install CachyOS and try it out. Then install Bazzite and try it out. By “Try it out” I do mean setting up a copy of or a test-install of your required services (arr stack, jellyfin, …), to see if everything is as you’d expect. Possibly install more distros to try them out, then make up your mind and actually fully migrate, or if it doesn’t work out go back to your currently installed drive. Installing a linux distro takes like 10 minutes these days, then play around with however long you need. Since you already have it narrowed down to only 2 options anyway, that is most likely the best solution.
I switched to Bazzite last week, and also run Jellyfin. It’s been a pain. Hours of troubleshooting. I’m still having an issue with metadata, but I think that’s actually just Jellyfin. That said, most of the issues were easy to fix, just hard to research. SELinux is a pain and messes up Jellyfin.
Sudo Setenforce 0
And it works like a charm. Doing volume labeling does not work. Other than that, you just need to adjust to using podman instead of docker.
Oh, and gaming just works. STALKER 2 runs better on Bazzite for me than it did on Win10.