I think it’s just that they don’t care about performance. It’s been the case for a while that typically games run faster on Linux through WINE/Proton despite using a translation layer.
And there’s a bunch of background services taking up memory and CPU on Windows that are hard to turn off.
Yeah, I’ve always wanted to do something like that. I’ve always got a bunch of computers running virtually idle and it would be nice if they could just help out with whatever your main PC is doing.
Yeah, both my Linux PC’s probably wouldn’t even run Win 10, let alone Win 11. As long as they work, pretty much any PC from the last decade can still run any distro and be sufficient to do any kind of productivity workload.
My answer would basically be yes, but. An old desktop (or even laptop) can definitely be used and will run fine. It should be very easy to get one for free or very cheap as companies will typically write them off after 3-5 years.
However, you might want to consider power consumption. Running a desktop 24/7 will use a lot more power than a new MiniPC or a NUC, so you may want to calculate how much it’ll cost to run a desktop 24/7 compared to a device that only uses 5W or whatever, and see whether the upfront savings make up for what you’ll pay in electricity over a certain period.
I think you might actually want to look into second hand MiniPCs unless you absolutely need to fit a bunch of hard drives in a case (like you probably would with Jellyfin).
Also I want to echo what others are saying about noise. A desktop or rack mounted server will make more noise than a laptop or MiniPC.