You’re not wrong but I don’t see what that has to do with my point, which was - don’t blame distros for this. They can influence the conversation but not control it. If you find what you want isn’t supported then pick something that supports most things like Ubuntu, or Nobara.
Driver support is down to the manufacturer. Distros can’t give you things that don’t exist.
OP, listen to this person. Docker will earn you cash. Podman is nicer to work with for your own shit.
Nail on the head.
You’re usually stuck with what your seedbox provider gives you.
I’ve done the same thing as the person you replied to is suggesting for around 10 years now. It works very well for a home user because parts etc are readily available. Most hypervisors will run on x86/amd64 hardware without issue. Check out something other than proxmox. LXC is one suggestion. If you’re going to stick with Debian look into SAMBA with BIND to ensure ease of sharing and cross platform integration.
Another reason to not get an old server is power, noise and thermals. They’re designed to live in an air conditioned room. Anyone who works in server rooms for any length of time will tell you to wear ear protection.
I tried jellyfin/emby for the third time about 6 months back. I had heaps of encoding issues (not playing) with x265 and lots of issues with dolby encodes (running it through my home theatre from a 2017 nVidia shield using the official client). I even went so far as to run a separate ffmpeg instance but no dice. Until it’s not a hobby project and ‘just works’ I’m not interested.