OpenSUSE MicroOS or Fedora CoreOS. If you'll be using containers you'll have a great time. If you don't want to deal with transactional systems, then there is literally nothing I'd rather use than Debian.
GunnarGrop
Totally get The Foreman. Worst piece of garbage I've ever used.
I do use ansible to set up my own repository management/lifecycle environment servers nowadays, specifically to get rid of Foreman.
Why do you dislike ansible? Got to say that I love it, especially compared to stuff like Puppet and SaltStack.
I'm a sysadmin with a background in computer science, so I'll say any fucking enterprise software on the planet. It's all trash and annoying. I'd run Debian every day of the week over Windows or RHEL and the likes.
I never knew how much I love and appreciate open source/free software until I worked in enterprise...
"But VMWare PERFORMS BETTER than Proxmox!". Yeah, with 10 times the chance of making you depressed.
The Foreman/Red Hat Satellite. Many people wont know what it is, but it's the worst, bugiest, slowest piece of garbage I've ever touched.
Also Windows... I'm a Linux sysadmin but my work computer "needs" to use Windows and I've never disliked it as much as when I've been forced to work with it. Why is the virtual desktop experience so trash???
I haven't used Jellyfin with docker before, just with podman and as a pod in k3s. Both work great and are easy to maintain. If you're more familiar with podman then docker, then I'd recommend using podman.
Just make sure to mount your volumes with the :z or :Z flags. I have disabled SELinux on servers in the past, but never when I've just used podman containers, since "it just works" with SELinux. Literally never had any problems with containers and SELinux.
I'm currently running Jellyfin on a VM in Proxmox and have been for a long time, it works great. My storage solution isn't glorious, but it is simple. I just have a Debian LXC container in proxmox that bind mounts a large disk and exposes that through an NFS share. Then I've installed jellyfin with Podman/Docker on a VM that has that NFS share mounted.
Also, a lot of people have already said this, but Podman/Docker only looks intimidating before you use it. It's A LOT easier to get applications running then using the "traditional way". The only thing that could potentially increase complexity for you is to expose a GPU to the docker container. But since you said you don't have a dedicated GPU I'd strongly recommend using a docker container for the job. Once you've used it, you'll never look back.
I used to manage the file hierarchy myself, but I haven't done that for years at this point. Same goes for tagging files and such. I just download everything to a root folder called "music" and let lidarr handle everything from there.
Lidarrs default file structure is something like {Artist}/{Album}{Year}/{Track} . This can of course be changed. Then I let lidarr just tag everything for me automatically, embedding album art and such.
It's a great setup overall, but I don't know where Lidarr indexes it's music library from, because some artists and albums might be missing sometimes. That's really the only pain point.
I think that's kind of what they meant. I've also selfhosted Nextcloud for years, but I only use file sync and calendar/contacts.
Lately I've been feeling that Nextcloud is too big and clunky for just that. Like it's something I'd love to setup at work or for an org, but that it "feels" to heavy for home use these days.
I need to check out Radicale, I think.