I case anyone is interested, I have Plex up and running now and wife is happy, some feedback on how it went

Why it went:

• I needed to install Plex specifically, because all the set-top boxes we use support plex but are fairly locked down. Wife likes their interface and remote control and doesn’t want to change (they are simple to use< Australia Telstra boxes, all free)
• I choose Mint, I thought I’d prefer a GUI to make the install easier and also wanted to see what Linux desktops were like these days

How it went

• Install was trivial when I chose “simple” - I tried advanced to format the two drives I had (which were messy with many partitions I wanted blown away), but when I tried one method it told me I had a Boot drive but no NIF or NEF drive (or something) in order to boot - when I told it to install that type (Found it in the list) it told me I had no boot drive now (Online help for Mint install on Mint web site was out of date and the GUI didn’t match what I saw - a common theme - so made it harder) - Gave up, choose SIMPLE. No idea what it installed but it worked
• Lot more raw command line that you’d expect from a GUI, In fact not sure the GUI does anything at all. I used the command line commands for almost the entire install
• The Networking failed and was as bad as Windows off the bat. HOWEVER fixing any networking issues was much easier than windows (I still have network issues in my windows machines from 5 years ago, never could fix them) but the two issues I had with Mint, (1) plex could not be seen (answer: ufw opened one port) and (2) Windows could not see and share a Mint drive (answer: Samba installed with one line and permission set on a folder) were fixed in a few minutes
• Man you can trash your OS with one command! Reinstalled once because I did a chown on the wrong folder and gave plex the sole ownership of the entire drive whereupon nothing ran anymore!
• Much faster, better software generally, the trans-coding for videos seems better, the speed of the desktop “server” is faster and Plex is madly playing everything nice and clearly with great response time.
• Stuff changes a LOT between versions apparently- many suggestions online failed for me because the suggested folders or files no longer existed or had been moved or changed. Likewise Mints own sites screen shots doesn’t match reality.
• People are confused a lot - One of the common issues is Plex cannot see the folders where your videos are, as Plex runs under its own user - The number of different methods people have used to get around this is outstanding! And every one is thumbed up as “the answer that solved my problems!” From changing the user Plex uses to root or other users that already have permissions, to adding plex ownership of folders or even changing permissions of the folders to either something safe, or just ROOT ROOT ROOT. It is hard to know what you should be doing (Even changing permissions there were apparently at many programs to use, not sure which was the right method… chown, setfacl, chmod (I know they are different, I glanced at the docs but with so much to learn it becomes a bit overwhelming and you just take the first suggestion and stick with it)

Edit: at any rate, works fine now ty all for suggestions. Now I am getting annoyed I don’t have ALL the services running on the server and am starting to see what else I can run and how… all without interrupting my wifes streaming of course!

I actually went back and had a look at a few of the top results and I have a feeling a lot were AI written Sandtraps. Several were very similar "Install your favorite Linux then "

Makes it had for a newbie who doesn’t know what they don’t know so can’t ask the right question.

The Mint install works fine now, I made a lot of mistakes and took a while to get head around the folder structure and permissions but once I am more comfortable next time I’ll try something a little more headless I think, though playing around I reckon I’d be happy with Mint as a daily machine (if only my job wasn’t coding Windows apps :/)

Could be, dunno yet how to tell these things but the issue was a port was not open. Once opened the server was seen fine!

Hah! Apparently in the long list of UFW commands I was running, the first one didn’t run or I missed it, can see the server now at least, just need it to see the files!
Entertaining but the wife is getting impatient :/

Thanks, I decided to see what happened with a Mint Install (Before I saw your reply) so as a Toe-in-water thing to learn more about the OS and see what stuff was like. I only Kitty into a Linux server for work and do some basic tasks on it occasionally so was interested.

An … interesting experience… trivial install, easy enough to understand the UI, entirely failed to get a Plex server working though… Nothing on the network can see it (Local works fine) which doesn’t make much difference because Plex has nothing to server since it can’t see the folder with movies on it due to, I believe, ownership issues (The files are on a portable USB drive)

Still fiddling but most help documents descend into arcane command line arguments very quickly and are generally “wrong” in that they suggest editing files that don’t exist in folders that aren’t there.

Still… a learning experience :) (Easy enough to kill it and tried Debian if I can’t work out chown!

What part of this do you think is hard?

Not hard… essentially worthless however…

The articles are saying “Here is a list of almost all known versions of Linux, these are good for you to use” when you query what the best option is… Hardly narrowing down anything. Likewise saying “Use your favorite… then install the product you want to use” is also useless information if you are asking the question I was… I have no favorite obviously since I know nothing about it… and OBVIOUSLY I am going to install the produce I just asked about installing…

The pages I was looking at answered the question “How do I install Linux?” by saying “First, Install Linux”

Not to say there aren’t better sources, but all the first ones I found where along that theme

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