Raspberry Pi 2 or 3 (can’t remember which) controlled through the TV with the remote. It’s running LibreElec (Kodi) with the Jellyfin plugin. Discoverability isn’t great through Kodi, but I can always use a computer or phone to find the media and cast if I need to.

I believe the issue is only with Tailscale Funnels. With Funnels, the data runs through TS’s infrastructure so it’s subject to whatever kind of bandwidth limitation they feel like enacting.

As others have said, you don’t need to know how to code, but you do need to be comfortable editing structured documents, so knowing a little programming does help.
Unfortunately, Nextcloud and email are two of the most difficult things to self-host. This is by reputation, I haven’t tried myself. Email is supposed to be particularly difficult and the usual advice is to not bother.
Jellyfin is pretty straight-forward as long as you don’t have a weird hardware decoding setup and as long as you don’t want remote access. If you do want remote access you need to use third party tools to do it securely. If it’s just for your own use then Tailscale makes it really easy. If you want to share with non-technical users it gets messy.

Home Assistant can track Jellyfin playback status, so there’s some kind of API there. Whether or not there’s a convenient way to trigger the tasks is another question.

I went with Debian and I use Docker for containers. I considered Proxmox, but I didn’t end up trying it. PiHole is a good application for the Pi Zero (I have an early generation Pi dedicated to running PiHole), but you could also run it on the Beelink.

I strongly recommend you download Obsidian and keep hyperlinked notes on everything you do and links to every tutorial/resource you end up using.
Have a place to keep all the passwords your services will end up needing. A password manager is the best option. Make the password on your admin account on Debian (or whatever) easy to remember and enter, since you’ll need to sudo a lot.
If the Beelink comes with a copy of Windows installed, you can recover the key from within Linux with the following command:
sudo strings /sys/firmware/acpi/tables/MSDM
Then you have a spare Windows key should you ever need one.

Sears & Roebuck

AWS

According to my Synology:

Where are you finding this data? It’s not Info Center -> Storage…

I use Portainer mainly to start / stop / restart containers without the mental load of using the command line. It works fine with Compose if you can get (or write) a yaml file for the container you’re interested in, or you can use it to pull from the repository and set everything up if you can’t. Portainer also gives you a nice, one-stop view of the current state of your containers. Basically, it can’t hurt to have it around.
Personally, my favorite Docker management GUI is the one that comes with Synology NASes. It’s much less clunky that Portainer and iirc a little more powerful. But of course it only runs in their hardware.

I would be using Fintube for Youtube integration, but it’s broken :-(

That’s good to know. I leave location services off on Android when I’m not using them and the possibility of a triangulation leak always nagged me a little. Not a lot, because I’ve never heard of any actual harm coming from it. But a little.

The server certainly should have picked up the change in metadata but I can’t help you with why it didn’t.
I can suggest that you edit the metadata in Jellyfin rather than using external tools and moving items in and out of the library. Just click the three-dot menu for a track or album and choose “Edit metadata”. If it doesn’t pick up changes made from Jellyfin then something is very wrong.

If you can avoid having you server and the media library on separate systems you should. That means buying (or I suppose building, but I wouldn’t recommend it) a NAS with sufficient processing ability to stream / transcode as much as you need, or stuffing a lot of storage into your mini PC.
One of the problems you’ll run into if you use separate systems is that it’s non-trivial to get the server to automatically notice new items in the media library and update to include them. I’m sure there are others.

Ah, okay. I’ll hold off on updating then (I think I’m using native mode, but I can’t remember).

So this WON’T break the “Jellyfin” Kodi plugin? Just making sure it’s not the same thing as “Jellyfin4Kodi”.

Well that’s a shame. I’m sort of half-assedly using syncthing to backup my photos from my phone to my server, but mostly I rely on immich. I never really got the hang of using syncthing with my phone.

Lol, I still check out slashdot too - although it’s usually a day late with news and the comments aren’t anything special. Force of habit I guess.

Wow, that takes me back. I used to prefer Anandtech to Ars Technica, Hot Hardware, Tom’s Hardware, etc.
But I haven’t visited any of them in like a decade, so I can see why they might be shutting down.

Masochism, paranoia.

Another vote for Debian, and I’ll suggest you go ahead and install Jellyfin directly rather than messing with Docker.
https://jellyfin.org/downloads/server
I’d been running JF under Docker on my NAS, but when I moved to a new server I decided to just install it directly and it hasn’t been any problem at all. You’ll get a notification when it needs to be updated and it’s just a few clicks to do so. You won’t have to fight with Docker to get hardware acceleration working - which isn’t to say it won’t be a PITA, but it’s one less layer of complication.