I’m thinking of switching my plex server from Win10 to Linux (Ubuntu/Fedora probably). Can anyone compare and contrast the two versions? Are they identical in abilities and indistinguishable? Or, will I pull my hair out getting it to run? Yep, I’m not a Linux guru, just a guy who’s played with it a bit here and there. As for my data drives, they’re not on the OS install drive so I’m HOPING that I can just mount them in Linux no issues.
Also I use and rely on the DVR. Is that seamless as well in Linux? Thanks.
Functionality wise you’re going to be getting roughly the same thing.
The big question would be why do you want to move the server from win10 to linux? I myself moved from a win10 server to a linux install, but my main reason was to move everything off my gaming machine to a dedicated headless box which I could also play around with. My route actually went windows -> FreeBSD -> ubuntu.
With that being said I am no master at linux and have things running pretty smoothly. I didn’t use the same format from my windows machine for the data drives and actually moved over to ZFS in FreeBSD and then to ZFS on Linux in Ubuntu.
I don’t have any DVR’s so I can’t comment how seamless it is, but as long as you have the DVR build installed the user interface should be pretty identical for you.
My sense these days is that Ubuntu is more user-friendly than Fedora, but I haven’t played with Fedora in many, many years. Ultimately though your experience is probably going to be identical at a high level, with a lot of the nuances being drivers, package support methodology, etc.
Thanks guys. The why is a bit of a miff. My plex computer is a HP Envy I bought on eBay last year. Suddenly my computer is unactivated, I tried dealing with Microsoft and spent some time letting someone go through my PC and get it to reactivate (it was at one time) but keeps saying “Can’t connect to your corporate licensing server”. Long story short, I’m thinking the guy that sold me the PC sold me non-authorized windows and I’m faced with buying a new license (almost $200) or maybe taking the plunge. Kinda peeves me off as this was last year and things have worked fine until now. I never really “use” this computer other than to remote into it, check plex, download stuff, process stuff, etc. My laptop I bought new and have all licenses and it works fine.
Go with Linux Mint. It is more or less designed to make it easy for users to transition from windows to linux.
You should also be able to READ from your data disks in linux (I’m assuming they are formatted as NTFS). Writing to them may be bigger problem (not quite up to speed here).
But give it a try from a live install from a usb-drive!
Does Mint still require a full clean re-install to “upgrade” to a new major version? One of the reasons I ditched it.
JBin: the guy left a KMS-licensed version of Windows on the computer. Those versions need to periodically “phone home” to the company KMS server to remain licensed. It was a legit version, but not one you were legitimately entitled to use and he was an idiot or jerk for leaving that on there and selling it like that. If the computer still has a Windows license sticker on it somewhere, you might be able to re-format and use that standalone license. But Linux is great.
@sremick Not sure, but I think so. I haven’t used it regularly since I moved to Mac. Linux Mint themselves recommend you only upgrade when you need to, not when every new release comes around.
But they have a rolling install that is based on Debian Testing instead of Ubuntu that should be able to do what you want.
