Everything about it is so bad. It’s like someone woke up one day and thought, what is the legally worst piece of software I can make and force in people?

I meant like a daily usage situation - e.g. working from a terminal, running MacVim, and things like Firefox and Slack etc. all work fine from a Mac - but I don’t self-host, and I run actual Mac OSX itself, so my answers may be of limited utility to you.

If someone else is reading this I would look into running a Jellfin server from a machine running Linux, which can be connected to from a device running iOS or Android or whatever they want - but your kodi+mpd already sounds like it should do the trick.

Hopefully you can avoid running Mac OSX itself, but if that’s not possible then perhaps at worst you could get a machine that does that and then partially isolate it on the network? (though that is beyond my skillset:-)

For TV I just an ancient ChromeCast (iirc it’s a first-generation even!) and that works from everything (ironically one of the harder solutions was from Samsung mobile, though even ancient iPads have apps that will make it happen). I worry about when my TV and especially the ChromeCast dies what will I do - it will take so much time to investigate a replacement, it seems all/most of the newer solutions are trying to inject ads or whatever into the stream, or even just not working as simply as the old. Mine is security through obscurity, which only works for so long until the hardware flat wears out:-).

And I barely have a backup solution - just a single SSD that I put stuff onto when I think about it, and is aging so when it too wears out… I have so much catching up that I need to do, I’m setting myself up for pain most likely:-(. But also I tend to “stream” most things rather than “download”, so my need for thus is extremely much smaller.

The last one about a backup is a great idea. Not because some receipt can be misleading, but because my 20y+ with Windows showed me it has some temper on it’s own and can kick back for no reason.

I wish you to get it right without a problem.