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[Question] [Project] [Help] What's a good OS for a home server? (lemmy.world)
submitted 6 months ago by to c/selfhost@lemmy.ml
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I'm putting together a bunch of my old PC parts to get a home server going, and i was wondering what the best OS would be. I have Mint installed on it currently, but I'm not sure thats the best option so I'm looking for alternatives.

I'm definitely a Linux novice, so I dont want anything super complicated. I was thinking of using Debian since it seems decent, but I really know nothing about the different distros and would appreciate a good starting point if anything

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[–] 3 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

It depends. What do you plan to use it for? Depending on the answer, perhaps Mint might not be the best option, but I can share my personal experience.

My use case is a headless server running OCI containers through rootless Podman (this is Docker's modern equivalent). I've been running this on Linux Mint on a compact PC for a few years. I enabled unattended upgrades, and once in a while I VNC into it and upgrade Mint itself. I also installed a CRON job to reboot automatically every few days. So far I've not encountered any major issues.

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  • [–] [S] 3 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    Im still figuring out what to do with it, but for now just file backup and maybe a minecraft server or something. It'd also be neat to host my own fedi instance or website. I'm largely doing this as a learning experience, and I'm not even sure what all i can do with a home server.

    I know you can pretty much use any OS, but I'd rather start with something with more capabilities rather than have to switch the OS after setting up a bunch of stuff

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  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

    In that case I would say start with a Debian-based or Ubuntu-based distro of your choice. Ubuntu-based distros are also Debian-based, since Ubuntu is Debian-based. Mint is Ubuntu-based so it's a good choice imho. Mint should work pretty well for backups and Minecraft.

    As a counter-example, Mint would (probably) be a poor choice if you want to turn that PC into a router or a DNS server, but sounds like that's not what you have in mind.

    If you plan to Install more stuff in the near future, you could optionally look into containerization (Docker) which would allow you to someday swap Mint with another distro when you decide that you feel like changing. All of this, without having to reconfigure anything. Portainer might be a good soft-entry to Docker if you don't love the terminal, it gives you a nice UI. And it's compatible with Mint, ofc.

    As for the fedi instance, it's a good exercise, you will learn a lot about networks. Personally I tried installing a Lemmy instance too, but I ended up turning it off as I realized that it didn't make sense for my use case. It just wasted bandwidth to stay in-sync with the rest of the fediverse.

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