My first choice would still be Ubuntu, however if you don’t like them RHEL is available for free for homelab’s by jumping through some hoops.

Might also take a look at NixOS. Been running it for a while with no issues.

There have been many over the years. When I first discovered linux (shortly before linux 2.6 was released) it was RTFM (read the f*ing manual " and “each tool should do only one thing”.

I generally use micro on the terminal, kate or gedit in the GUI, depending. No hate towards the others, just what I’ve settled on over the years.

Until about a year ago, I was just using Jellyfin for all of my media. For music I was using the phone app FinAmp.

I set up Navidrome when I ran into a bug that made music playback unreliable. Jellyfin fixed the bug and it’s back to being rock solid, but I still mostly use Navidrome for music.

Honestly I think the only reason why I stuck with Navidrome is that it has better playlist support. Building playlists still sucks but it sucks a little less in Navidrom as it can actually import playlists made elsewhere. Other than that, Navidrome has a better web interface for music.

I tend not to sail the Sea’s very often. I generally prefer to buy the albums or borrow them from my friends or the local library, rip them to Flac and then stream them to my phone using either Jellyfin or Navidrome. When I just want a radio station, I’ll open up Spotify. Many years ago, I had a collection of online radio stations I’d listen to, but over time they either closed their public streams and required an dedicated app or died off completely.

On your data bandwidth issue, both Jellyfin and Navidrome support on demand transcoding and can stream any bitrate you might want. There are options for it both in the web app and in most of the phone clients I’ve run across. I generally have my phone apps set to 96k MP3 as I can’t really hear a difference most of the time, at least not with the headphones I have in combo with the background noise that is generally around me and my preexisting hearing damage. Most folks can’t tell a difference between CD’s and a 128k mp3.

As for torrenting, I can say that you will probably want a paid VPN running AND active any time your torrent software is running. Beyond that I would recommend you check out !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com for more information.

I like this idea. I’ve been doing pretty much the same thing for a while now, though it’s been a subdirectory of Documents.

That sounds cool! Been looking for something like this for a while!

I set it up at my old house, I just never found a use case for that particular workflow. When I listen to music, It’s more frequently from my phone, and I didn’t see an obvious way to make that work. From what I remember, it seemed like it was more suited to being run off automations inside the home, rather than what I was doing which was listening to music while I was at work. That was 2ish years ago though and things may have changed.