Good news selfhosted crowd! I pitched the idea of setting up a server, and she is down with the idea!

I want to run Linux and host things like Jellyfin, Audiobookshelf, Navidrome, maybe Plex (I currently host it off my Mac desktop but would move it to a dedicated server).

I know you can host Plex et al on something like a Raspberry Pi, but I want a bit more power. I want something that can push at least 2-3 4K streams.

I’m considering targeting 12th gen i5 with 16GB DDR4. Maybe 32GB if I can swing it. Is that overkill? I know you want 8th gen Intel for hardware transcoding of either x265/HEVC or AV1 (probably the former as the latter is newer).

There are other projects I’d like to run. I’d like to be able to host my own LLM/AI but I’m not trying to go performance overkill here. This would be my first server.

I am somewhat comfortable using the command line, and I would be remoting into the server via my Macs (I have a desktop and a MacBook). However, Linux can run Windows games via Proton and that’s something I’m interested in for some older titles that aren’t on Xbox (like Deus Ex, which came out in 2000 and should run on integrated graphics). I’m not inexperienced with Linux and have been using it off and on (mostly off unfortunately) for over 30 years. My go-to would be Ubuntu, but I’ve heard great things about KDE lately and I know the Internet is in love with Mint these days. Would the distro really matter all that much as long as I have the required services?

  • SuspiciousCarrot78@aussie.zoneEnglish
    51·
    15 hours ago

    I can speak to this because one of my old servers was pretty much the machine you’re proposing.

    Briefly, in terms of distros, choose what you like (within reason). I’ve always trended towards dietpi, which is extremely light. I actually just stood it up on the Raspberry Pi 4B last night. Headless and by itself it takes a whole whopping 300MB of RAM at idle. Even with all this running,

    Synapse

    PostgreSQL

    Cinny

    Arcane

    qBittorrent

    RDT-Client

    Radarr

    Sonarr

    Prowlarr

    Docker

    Dropbear

    Fail2ban

    Tailscale

    Syncthing

    Argon One

    TigerVNC

    it sits under a GB

    Do your own research, etc.

    Pushing 4k streams, it’s not overkill at all, but by the sounds of it, you’re meaning to transcode on the fly? Be aware of AXV-512 support issues etc in Linux vs diff chips. Actually better make sure that your i5 has AXV-512 (not that it’s particularly required for transcoding but it helps) so double check.

    Yes, you can run reasonable LLMs on that machine, though without a GPU, you’ll need to investigate exactly which backend runner best supports your CPU.

    If you’re looking at a dense model on that rig, consider something in the 4 to 9 billion parameter range. Most comfortably, something like a Qwen3.5-4B, Gemma-4-E4B, MiniCPM or Tiny Ling…or a larger MoE (I like grug 35b-a3b, but Arcee Trinity mini or even GPT-OSS 20B could work) but the more parameters the slower it’ll run. OTOH, just more params =! always better. See -

    https://reddit.com/comments/1w47xpd

    Gaming wise, obviously you want something that can run Proton, wine, DOSBox, etc. I can’t claim that my pet distro runs all of those OOB because I’ve never tried, but it’s been my general experience that Ubuntu variants seem to do gaming best.