Here's a tricky question - what operating system should I choose?

I have somewhat conflicting requirements: I want to have a small portable "media & services" device, ideally not much bigger than a phone, that's easy to connect to a local network over ethernet or wifi.

This device then starts acting as shared drive/storage, so I can easily read and upload files to it from my laptops and (maybe) access it from my phones. At the same time when I connect this device over HDMI to a TV I want to have a reasonable media browser and a player (movies, shows, maybe music, podcasts), for plus points controlled with TV remote. I don't care much about data reliability, almost all this is media that I can try downloading again later. Optional: It would be great if it's easy to run some services from this as well, like pi-hole.

Most of the time it would be connected to a home network, but I'd grab it when I travel and then connect it in whatever hotel or a place to a TV and have access to my media and files.

So my current setup is that I have MeLE Quieter 3C with 16GB RAM, I put a 2TB M.2 SSD in it (and another 1TB microSD just as a storage expansion for files I don't care about accessing fast).

And now the question is which system should I put on it? Essentially should I do something like TrueNAS, or something like Umbrel, or Proxmox or just run bare Debian on it? Or something else? How stupid and wrong am I?

#homelab #minipc #umbrel #debian

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nostr:npub1y3uh89v5a4vq92t8q0j6su94zhvcdxpywjn3l6hpsr5welarqtrqj7yzhd I saw you talk about proxmox - would it make sense for my setup explained above?

(Sorry for the random call out)

You could use Proxmox but that ram amount is pretty low. You could still use with just the LXC containers option. But for VMs need way more ram. Could run Debian 12 with docker, docker-compode, and yacht or portainer. I'd try that first. 🤙