Jellyfin, a free and open-source self-hosted media server that lets you organize, manage, and stream your own movies, TV shows, music, photos, and other media across devices, has published its January 2026 “State of the Fin” update, marking seven years since the project’s founding, with several important points.
One of the most significant topics is versioning. Following the release of Jellyfin 10.11, the team has begun internal discussions about revising its versioning scheme in a future major release. Among the ideas being explored is dropping the “10” series entirely, which would result in the next major release being labeled 12.0.
On the client side, Jellyfin has announced a rebrand of its desktop application. Jellyfin Media Player is being renamed to Jellyfin Desktop. The most impactful technical change behind the rebrand is the migration from Qt 5 to Qt 6, which developers report has already led to noticeable performance improvements.
Keep in mind that the new Jellyfin Desktop does not migrate saved servers or settings from the previous application. Developers have also laid early groundwork for easier server switching through new profile-related command-line options, with a graphical interface planned for the future. Alongside these changes, the release includes a wide range of bug fixes.
Jellyfin Desktop is currently available via Flathub and the Arch Linux AUR. Stable builds for Windows and macOS are not yet available. Additional Linux distribution packages are expected later, although the project recommends Flathub as the primary installation method for now.
Finally, note that Jellyfin Desktop does not currently support Ubuntu 24.04 LTS because its Qt stack remains at version 6.4. The new desktop client depends on mpvqt, which requires Qt 6.5 or newer, making official support impractical until the distribution updates its Qt packages.
For more information, see Jellyfin’s announcement.
