I’m building a desktop that I want to use both as a LAN server and a media player by the TV.
I’ve been looking into distros and or solutions that would best solve it, and not gotten too far. Aiming for Debian currently, and testing if openmediavault can be also ran with kodi. I want me and my two roomates to be able to access files on it, and to use qbittorrent on the pc directly. acessing it outside of our house is not a big priority but would be a nice plus
Question is: is there some distro or solution that is for me, and I just don’t know it - and if not, do you have any suggestions for my setup? :)
(Pc is gonna be run with Ryzen 5 3600x, GTX 1080ti, 16gb Ram, 128SSD for OS and, 5 3TB HDD in raid.)


I would recommend Jellyfin. It’s pretty simple to set up and access on LAN via PC, TV, and mobile.
Not all TV’s have a Jellyfin client, which I assume is why OP is thinking Kodi as a UI for the PC while connected to TV. Plus Kodi has plugins that can give you other features.
He could still run Jellyfin for other devices though, and get the best of both worlds.
Yea, so it’s a bit of quality thought.
I have an amp that does great audio, and an hdr tv. amp’s passthrough does not support 4k hdr, and the tv’s optical out does not supprt high quality audio.
I dont got too much room in our apartment, so the homelab will be here anyways and will have room for the decent gpu I have lying around.
I don’t think the tv will be able to run the stream uncompressed.
I do plan on experimenting with jellyfin tho! Just not for the main tv living room
I’d run Jellyfin and use the Kodi plugin for that.
I guess you could just connect to itself for whatever TV it’s connected to. You won’t get a fancy TV ui/ux but a wireless keyboard/mouse would get the job done.