This is old hardware. It's a dual-Xeon Dell Precision 490. The Dell support page says warranty coverage began on July 10, 2007, so it's no spring chicken. It has some Nvidia video card that's old, but newer than the computer, but I use Plex to stream to a Roku or XBox, so the video card is kind of a moot point. Also, I live alone, so I don't have to worry about anyone rebooting the computer on me (aside from hardware and power failures). I'd really like to build something quieter and more efficient for a Plex server, but that's a pretty low relative priority.

I've used Debian, Mint, Ubuntu, and OpenSUSE in the past. They were all good. I kind of wanted to try something new, but right now I'm leaning toward Mint.

On Sun, Aug 5, 2018 at 7:56 PM Joshua Stone <joshua.gage.stone@gmail.com> wrote:

If you're using Intel or AMD graphics, then I highly recommend trying out Fedora. It gets the newest kernel and Mesa versions during a release's life cycle, and it typically stays close to upstream. Fedora (Workstation) also isn't rolling release, so you can expect your system to not have any breaking changes from an update which is an important quality in a server. As far as I know, Manjaro having a rolling release model doesn't make this stability guarantee.

Plex also seems to have official builds for Fedora, which can be configured with this guide here:

http://bendavis.me/2015/03/29/setup-plex-media-server-on-fedora/

Some of the steps could be simplified like this:

sudo dnf install https://downloads.plex.tv/plex-media-server/1.13.5.5291-6fa5e50a8/plexmediaserver-1.13.5.5291-6fa5e50a8.x86_64.rpm

sudo systemctl enable --now plexmediaserver.service

Fedora is also nice if you want to be experiment with some of the latest in Linux desktop technologies. It typically releases with the latest stable Gnome version, and includes new features like Wayland, Flatpak, and Pipewire.

-Josh

On Sun, 2018-08-05 at 16:31 -0400, Richard Klein wrote:
I'm having trouble deciding which distro to install on my new SSD.

It's the only desktop computer in the house, so it's used for web, email, etc, plus it's a Plex server.

DistroWatch.com shows Manjaro being really popular right now, but I've never heard of it. It's based on Arch, which I've heard of, but never tried. I see that Arch uses Pacman for a package manager. I'm used to APT; I'm not sure if I'd like Pacman.

So anyway, I thought I'd ask for suggestions.

--

Rich
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