Selfhosted

For distro I’d recommend God’s Chosen Stock Debian. You want prioritize smooth upgrade paths from one major version to another since the server should last a long ass time, and Debian is that. Debian has the eyes on it to make it chill and if there are things to do they’re caught and noted (and more often something is set up to just do it for you).

So no, distro doesn’t matter as long as you can get your software going. But you’re not going to beat the insane stability of Debian. Any OS based on it is just an echo, which may even involve custom kernels which add more work for the specific distro maintainers and may slow critical security updates.

I run no GUI but you can def have one. I just SSH in. I do everything in containers (Docker 1st and I’m moving to Podman - but Podman is too heavy a lift to start, Docker compose files are always right there, use em) and LXC containers run by Incus (it has a web gui as well!).

I’ve been looking at “games on whales” https://games-on-whales.github.io/ to stream games from a beefy server to weaker computers and tablets. Might be a good route for your games without having to directly game on the server.

I have a 4 core 7th gen Intel CPU and it seems fine with doing x265 transcoding on multiple streams, but I’ve never tried finding out how many 4K ones it can do at once. I have 32 GB of RAM (I bought cheapo laptop RAM before the true AI shitshow, praise be, stuck them in with a DIMM board cooked up by China). I had 16 before that, and it was fine. But I just kept adding services.

An LLM will eat your RAM, you’d want 32 GB to be able to run a 16 GB one. But a GPU will be much, much faster. LLMs are just matrix math - that’s why they’ll never be able to think for real - and GPUs are sicko good at that kinda math (cause screens are a matrix!). I don’t fuck with LLMs though, no ethics in that whole shitshow.

Good luck!

something that can push at least 2-3 4K streams.

12th gen i5 with 16GB DDR4. Maybe 32GB if I can swing it.

unless you're transcoding each stream that should work, at least for Plex.

Currently running 10th gen i5 with 32gb of DDR and can run one 4k transcode, five 1080 streams, and four live TV streams. though, the transcode is laggy but if you pause and let it buffer it should work.

keep in mind I'm also running headless transmission, a VPN, tor, and like 8 other services on the same server.

if all you're streaming is 4k, you will hit a point of diminishing returns on network throughput. I'd recommend getting a switch with SFPs and connect your server up to a 2.5gbe or even a 10gbe (though overkill but the sky is the limit). as long as all your stream boxes are connected through that switch on their regular 1gbe they should be fine.

personally I run a opnsense router/firewall and have everything passed through an unlocked Brocade ICX6610-48P-E. you can find them on eBay. FYI, these are commercial units and are VERY LOUD. basement or attic installation is a must if you don't have a network closet. bonus, the ICX6610 allows you to turn on/off POE per port and even set the voltage. this means you can power everything from cameras, stream boxes, wireless APs, to even some POE lights. it's also a managed switch, which means you can split your ports up on VLANs and other really neat things.

Wonder what this bot is farming for

Distro kind of matters.

Its a server, stability is the top priority. I'd avoid Ubuntu personally, and recommend Debian and Debian variants. For your first server (and your 4th+), I'd suggest proxmox. Its Debian with virtualization and a web interface, making it easy to manage services.

I'd also mention that you do not want a DE for your server. Its a lot of overhead for no real benefit, instead you should think of it as a headless machine you can remotely access - which is also what will make proxmox handy for you.

Intel wins in transcoding in most scenarios, so an intel-based system with an iGPU is a solid target. Full transcoding of AV1 starts with 14th gen, but that includes to AV1. For decode of AV1 for transcoding, 11th+. For anything else, 7th+.

With ram you can do more with more, but leveraging virt will make the load a lot lighter. Ive got systems with 32GB, but they are also hosting whole ass VMs and not just lxc's.

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.

16GB ram is plenty for everything but getting into LLM's.
If you do that then more is always better.... 32GB plus a 6-8GB GPU would be a basic setup for qwen 35b-a3b for example

random resource - lots of options. look up *ARR stacks

https://github.com/Rick45/quick-arr-Stack

LLMs

dont bother unless youre shelling out for a big ol gpu etc

Strongly recommend looking into Proxmox hypervisor as your base OS. Then install as many Linux VMs/LXCs as you like, with backups/snapshots all taken care for you. I'm on an Intel 8th gen CPU and have 3-4 VMs running, including Jellyfin, Home Assistant OS, an assortment of random docker images and a dedicated headless Debian VM for various AI projects. The CPU is more than enough, your 12th gen target will breeze through it. Get more RAM than you think you need - it will become the bottleneck for what you can do, not your CPU. I'm running 64GB and don't regret it!

For video encoding/decoding like Jellyfin/Frigate, make sure you stick with Intel CPU for hardware codec support via QuickSync, otherwise you'll need to add a GPU.

Like all projects, you should think about needs, budget, and time. You’ve got a good list of what you want to run which is a good start. Budget is next, particularly considering the price of hardware these days.

FWIW, I run Jellyfin, Navidrome, the entire arr stack, Forgejo, Paperless, mealio, and Immich on a NAS with 24GB RAM and have never needed more. 8GB would have been a bit tight but probably doable. 16 will be plenty for you.

Anything slightly better than a potato will run all of that except the llm's. To have a useful llm you need to spend circa £1k on a GPU and even then it won't come close to Claude or chatgpt. Skip the llm's for now. Just get yourself a solid little server to do everything else you need. Add dedicated hardware specifically for llm's in future if you really want to. An old used gaming pc will be plenty for your server. I personally use Debian , but there are loads of suitable options available

You can run an LLM, but it will be limited. Look into Open Vino Model Server.

I'd recommend a minimal install distro (Ubuntu server, Arch, Gentoo, etc...), then add the things you need from there.

Document every step. <--- important

Distro matters less as your skill increases, but if you're new, mint is the way to go.

I run jellyfin on my PC and I have a 9070xt that can handle llms.

Learn how to use docker, it makes jellyfin much easier. But you'll have some trials setting up a domain and https certs and doing port forwarding etc FYI.