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.
Got to say I really like the Fold. It's professional yet cozy
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.
Really? I've been using three and four finger gestures on Plasma for a while now. Three fingers to change desktop and so on. Are you on an old version of Plasma?
My preference for a few years have been a combination if IBM Plex Sans for most stuff and Iosevka for monospace. They both look amazing! Iosevka might look a bit weird when first seeing it but I can't really use anything else these days. However, Fira Code is a really good monospace font as well.
Even on windows I mostly do ctrl + left click. If I'm selecting files I'm most likely going to copy/cut/paste them, so I'm most likely going to have my other hand on the keyboard anyway
I haven't used Manjaro in years so my experiences are not up to date, but from my experiences it always felt unpolished and somewhat amateurish compared to other distributions, especially compared to Arch.
I've made Arch crash many times but part of their ideology is that Arch "is as stable as your are". So when I made Arch crash it always felt like a fault of my own.
Manjaro, however, that has marketed itself as a new user friendly distro borked itself after updates just as often as Arch. Back in the day at least. For a newbie oriented distro I don't think this is excusable.
Then Manjaro has done some really weird choices over the years, like with them shipping a proprietary office suite. As well as them not renewing their SSL certs in time for their forum. Several times...
Still, I don't like the idea of point release operating systems so I've always kept to rolling release systems, and if you want a solid rolling release then I have to recommend OpenSuse Tumbleweed. Haven't crashed even once in the 5+ years I've been using it on several PC's and servers (in the form of MicroOS).
Same thing happened to me. I just continued on and changed TTY and all was fine.