

average user doesn’t even know what a port number or IP address is
They don’t need to, just give them a url, username and password and let them type each for each field.
(If you mean because you want them to configure a vpn to access your jellyfin instance, then just expose it to the internet and skip that, which surely you pretty much have to do for your plex instance)
Cost:Convenience
Do people really think this or will they think (like everyone i know) that it’s free and I can watch what I want.
I may be misinterpreting you, but I think this is a thing with Dolphin. It has a preview pane, which supports all the file types I commonly interact with (F11), which can be dragged to resize bigger or smaller.
I haven’t used any preview thing on Windows, which is why I think I may be misunderstanding.
Anyways if you haven’t tried Dolphin, maybe it has a solution for you (made by kde project, but I believe it should be installable for any desktop environment).
https://apps.kde.org/dolphin/