Currently, I use Debian on my server. I have an Intel Arc GPU that I use for transcoding, however hardware encoding doesn’t work. I am able to get a slight performance benefit from decoding, but encoding would be much better. I have an A750 in my desktop (not server), and was able to get hardware acceleration working, but only with openSUSE Tumbleweed with the stable kernel (6.9.4). While I would love to have encoding, (I am limited on upload speed and av1 encoding isn’t practical on the CPU for multiple streams), I doubt it would be stable using a rolling distro and non-standard kernel. Has anyone else tried anything like this? Are there any arc + jellyfin users out there who know any way to make this work, or any openSUSE self-hosters could vouch for its stability? I am willing to try almost any distro (except ubuntu) to make this work.
Edit: fixed. There was some firmware I needed to work on debian. I will link and such in a bit when I have time.
Are you saying that it does work with open suse tumbleweed with the stock kernel?
I havent run opensuse much as a server but am always looking at it and Arch.
Probably going to switch to Arch eventually because the arch wiki is just the best docs I’ve found.
If you’re not relying on say a closed source driver that needs to compile for each kernel update you should have no issues there.
If you set up btrfs snapshots to run on updates then you could always just roll back if there’s a bad one. That’s how my arch laptop is set up.
Personally wouldn’t use Debian testing over arch or tumbleweed though. I think there’s something to be said for being on the same packages as the maintaners and not a testing version.