TLDR:
Just ditched Windows for Linux. In two days I set up Vaultwarden, a public Jellyfin server, and Minecraft servers. Automated my music library, solved configs and port conflicts, and now I can access everything anywhere. Linux finally lets me run my projects my way. If there is anything else any of you would recommend me looking into let me know! I do alot of data transfer, game / server hosting and a bit more.

The past day and a half on Linux has been amazing. I was dreading the switch because I didn’t want to risk losing all my data from Windows 10 Pro, which I’d accumulated over time. I decided to bite the bullet and zipped up everything I wanted to keep. After zipping, it was only about 1TB of data.

I was on a call with my friend, who’s a native Linux user and very eager to help me switch. He said he would be with me the whole time, and we started setting up Vaultwarden. We ran into a lot of configuration issues, and then he just said goodnight about an hour in. We started around 10:40 PM, and he left around 11:30 PM. I stayed up until the next day at 5 PM finally getting Vaultwarden fully setup. I’m pretty technical, so I’m not sure why it took me so long, but eventually, I got Nginx working after fixing a config issue 19 hours later.

After that, I set up my Minecraft servers and was feeling accomplished. The next night, about 24 hours after initially installing Linux, I wanted to set up my own cloud service to avoid paying for subscriptions. I started with Jellyfin, but ran into a port conflict with Vaultwarden. Luckily, I’ve had my own domain for years, mainly for Minecraft servers, so I managed to route both services properly and solved that issue.

Next came the music setup. I didn’t want to do everything manually, so I grabbed SoundCloud links from my account and a friend’s, since we have the same music taste. I downloaded the songs, but the file names were a mess with numbers and brackets. They were in M4A format, which works on PC, but I wanted MP3 for my phone. I found a script that converts all M4A files to MP3, deletes the originals, and keeps the MP3s. I put everything into Jellyfin, and it worked perfectly, I can stream, download, and listen on iOS.

The only problem was access outside my network, so I had to research how to make Jellyfin fully public. That was tricky, but it’s done now. I also started thinking about setting up a home VPN. I’m still deciding between WireGuard and OpenVPN, WireGuard uses keys, while OpenVPN uses username and password but I got halfway through setting up WireGuard before taking a break to play CS2 and hop on my Minecraft server.

Overall, I just wanted to say how much I’ve been enjoying Linux so far. It’s allowed me to bring my hobbies and projects to life in ways that weren’t possible on Windows.