Based on OPs experience this is the best solution.

If they want to learn, I found plex + plexamp was pretty easy to get going.

Ubuntu used to do ads pretty well, even before microsoft got better at them, haven’t used that distro in a while, so can’t confirm if that’s the case still, but you might want to check it out.

are those real? I don’t believe anyone ever said “it’s like linux but it works.”

It’s a little different than that, isn’t it? More like: " look at what I built, here’s a step by step guide that makes it work. Do with it whatever you want." Some people want to use it for their job. Others might use it for personal use, or to build more open source projects.

FreeCAD is pretty good