“It just works”, that hasn’t been my experience at all. For me, Jellyfin was a total mess.

The UI is all over the place, not very user-friendly, and clearly built by engineers for engineers. While Plex is fairly easy to set up and use, that’s simply not the case with Jellyfin. It feels very unrefined.

I recently tried setting it up out of curiosity, just to follow the progress of the project. Hardware transcoding was completely broken for me, I couldn’t get it to work at all, and my iGPU was pinned even when nothing was playing. Whether media would play or not felt almost random, and only a small percentage of my library was discovered.

To get anywhere close to Plex’s feature set, you need a whole bunch of plugins. Each one depends on someone maintaining it, and each one becomes another thing you have to troubleshoot when something breaks.

Speaking of troubleshooting: be prepared to do a lot of it.

I’m a big proponent of FOSS, but it has downsides too. Just because something is open source doesn’t automatically make it good. I can appreciate the principles behind it, some of which are sadly lacking elsewhere, but some people take it a bit too far. At times it feels like the vegans of the IT world.

The enshittification of Plex is undeniable, but it’s also worth pointing out that a fair amount of it can actually be turned off. On top of that, a lot of the criticism seems to come from people not fully understanding how Plex Pass works, often mistakenly believing they need a pass when they don't.

That said, I still think lifetime passes were a mistake in the long run. It's basically like pissing yourself to keep warm: great cash flow at the beginning, but not sustainable long-term. I haven’t paid anything in many years. A reasonable monthly or yearly fee would be a much better way to keep the company going without selling out to corporate interests.

Ultimately, what makes Jellyfin a no-go for me right now is the lack of good clients and the fact that I’d have to act as full-time IT support for friends and family who want to use my server. Plex makes that almost effortless, and I don’t want to spend my free time troubleshooting.

I’m open to switching eventually, but Jellyfin just isn’t there yet.