I have been running my Channels DVR on a Windows 10 computer for a few years now. This has been a very stable setup and I have software RAID for my data storage (I store photos and other data on this machine as well.) My hardware configuration will not support Windows 11 so I'm looking at options when Microsoft no longer support Windows 10. I am considering migrating this hardware configuration to Linux. Am I way off base here? Any suggestions on best Linux distro for Channels and software RAID support? Migration best practices?
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I have several PCs that would not officially support Windows 11. However, it is possible to install Windows 11 anyway by bypassing the requirements in the registry. See: How to install Windows 11 on unsupported hardware - Pureinfotech. My experience has been that Windows 11 continues to update and work fine on my machines. Of course, there are no guarantees, but neither are there with Linux on old hardware either. Personally, I prefer Linux as a server host, but Windows comes in handy for some things, so it may be worth attempting. As for a recommendation. For Linux, I'd choose Linux Lite or ZorinOS. Or, possibly a NAS OS like TrueNAS Core or TrueNAS Scale.
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For migrating, see the documentation at:
It is usually a quick and painless process if followed 
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That is great information. Thanks for the reply. I was considering bypassing the requirements as well. It is nice to have a Windows machine and there is nothing whatsoever wrong with the hardware. It is way overkill for file storage, DVR and lite computing at this point. My concern with moving to Linux was setting up the file storage again. I am using Storage Spaces with Windows now to manage the storage drives. I could configure something similar in Linux and restore from a backup. I have other compute devices so I don't need this one to run Windows necessarily, but as my primary storage for DVR, photos, etc I want it to be stable and secure. One advantage of having it run Windows with local storage is the cloud backup services are plentiful and inexpensive.
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Thanks for sharing this. I was looking at this as well and it looks pretty straightforward. It doesn't seem to call out moving from one OS to another, but I'm assuming that doesn't matter much.
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I moved from a Mac to Linux quite some time ago. After quite a bit of research, I chose to go with Ubuntu. I chose it because I was installing on pretty new hardware (a 10th gen Intel NUC), and a lot of the other distros don't seem to keep up with newer hardware as well and as easily as Ubuntu.
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