My experience is that it does run better however, depending on your media file types and player, plus if you’re sharing externally, memory is important.

Most of my content is in a format all of our playback devices can use so no transcoding typically but I share externally with extended family. I upgraded from an old OptiPlex running Windows with 16gb of RAM to an Asus Mini computer to reduce power consumption and have a better processor to support more streams.

No matter which OS you use, I’d recommend running in containers.