My wife consumes whatever media I throw at our Plex server and I’d like to stick with it (The tv’s + set top boxes/remote controls are all easy for her to use and stream Plex fine)
I’d grabbed an old work PC I replaced years ago, Windows 10, and tossed a Plex server on it and it’s worked for a long time but recently despite being used for NOTHING but Plex, its bloated itself like most Windows machines and I found Cortana taking 90% CPU (despite being disabled via registry) and some updates failing over and over.
I’d like to replace it (the software) but really no idea where to start, even the most helpful sites are just “use your favorite Unix then install Plex” or “Here are 56 perfect versions of Unix to install for your Plex server”
Honestly I use it for nothing except Plex, is there something easy enough I could look at?
If you’re only using it for Plex and nothing else, it probably won’t make a lot of difference which you use.
My old setup was Ubuntu running Plex as an install… if you just run a server without a gui, it’s like 3 lines to install Plex
I also have a pi as a portable setup running the docker version which works pretty well but I don’t think it will handle hardware encoding very well, but I could be wrong
Yeah Ubuntu came up in a few searches, I’ll read more about that, Desktop was 25gb which was a bit excessive given the age of the PC, will look at server, ty
Debian is another popular choice for servers (Ubuntu is based on Debian, with a few things bolted on top which are in my opinion not worth it). The default Debian installation only consumes 1-2GB disk space (just deselect any desktop environment during the installation process)
Minimised Ubuntu server I think only wants like 2.5gb of space and cuts out a lot of things you’ll never use