So here's the state of things right now:
I've got a Synology NAS with stuff like my movie collection stored on it. I think at some point I'll move my music collection up there, too. It's an ARM powered 2-bay thing, I'm not particularly interested in using any of Synology's software, and there's some stuff that won't run on that box because it's ARM instead of x86. I don't really have a "server" box running.
A few years ago I bought a "commercial TV" aka one that doesn't have Roku or whatever. For awhile, I ran OSMC (basically Debian Kodi) on a Raspberry Pi, which...I had enough problems with that it's unlivable. I'd rather just not have a television than continue to use OSMC.
In the meantime, I built a new gaming PC for my desk, the old machine (which happens to be in a Fractal Node 202 case so it already looks like a TiVo) has been moved into the living room. It's a Ryzen 3600/GeForce GTX-1080 machine with a bit over a terabyte of SSD and 16GB of RAM. It's still kicking bubblegum and chewing ass. Yes, it idles at a greater power draw than the Pi pulls at full steam, but it'll spend most of its time asleep, we'll be okay.
I'm currently still using Mint Cinnamon on it. Which is a hilariously unusable home theater OS. Plus I have my desktop (a Ryzen 7700/Radeon 7900GRE machine running Fedora KDE) and my phone (A Galaxy S10e) that I sometimes watch media on. Some questions:
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Why does VLC error out when trying to play mp4s stored on my NAS? Is it because SMB is Microsoft fucksewage that doesn't actually work? Because that's my working hypothesis.
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I have so little information on what Plex/Jellyfin even are, I gather Plex is at least semi-commercial while Jellyfin is the open source but worse option. These may or may not have a server component that has to run on a server-like box, which I don't and won't have.
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On the client side, I don't know if they take the place of a DE the way Kodi does, or if it's a separate app, or if you'd have to exit Plex or Jellyfin to use something like Steam, or if Steam Big Picture mode would work as a media center, but can it get to Youtube...
Is there anything out there that works better than throwing my TV away and forgetting about it?
Keep the synology as a high-uptime nas.
Im not sure which Linux district is best for gaming and running docker with an nvidia card. I just run NixOS for everthing, but that requires a lot of coding.
You should be able to keep running Linux mint on there. You can install steam and Delfin for jellyfin on there, both are available as flatpaks. You can connect the nas using NFS to /mnt in the machine using the fstab. For running the jellyfin server, I would install it using docker compose and put all the files for jellyfin in the NAS.
If you dont want to game, you could Sell the GTX 1080 and buy an Intel a310 for €100 (faster for transcoding and better Linux support).
I do want to use that machine for gaming, though more demanding games will be played on my main desktop machine. One thing about that GTX-1080 is it's a blower-style card, and the Node 202 case ...kind of needs it. Not a lot of ways for hot air to escape that case especially in the GPU bay, and I haven't seen a retail blower-style GPU since the GTX-10 series.
Yeah, that's fair. Nvidia gpus don't support linux well but it'll work well either way.