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"Ultimate" guide for literal beginners (lemmy.world)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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Hey selfhosters.

I have a question about starting self hosting; I have run Jellyfin on an old MacBook for a bit and wanna dip more than a toe into the self host pool. Are there any guides out there you’d recommend for actual, complete beginners who knows nothing but wants to learn?

I’ve searched a lot but it feels like they’re pretty advanced for beginners. Is it just a really sharp learning curve to this, or am I not finding the good ones?

Edit: To clarify what level I’m really, truly at: I run the Jellyfin server on regular macOS and have an external 5TB drive connected via usb. That’s it.

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[–] [S] 4 points 4 months ago (5 children)

Linux clearly is the way to go, I've seen. I've been in the Mac environment for the past 20 years so I think the very first thing to do is to install Linux on a VM. Question to that; I've seen Debian being mentioned a lot, is this "the best" to start with?

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago (4 children)

    Debian is good to start with as one of its key tenants is stability. Which is what you want in any environment.

    A lot of popular distros like Ubuntu and Mint are based on it.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago

    I started with Mint, then dipped into KDE Neon and Kubuntu, and these days I rock Debian on my server because I want absolutely nothing to fall over if possible. And that's how it's been for me. I SSH into it every couple of weeks to run updates, and that's about it.

    Debian is great. Boring, and great.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    Yeah, okay, that makes a lot of sense. I asked in another comment as well. I read about "headless" servers, which from what I understood means no GUI. Would you recommend that, or use a GUI first and then move to headless when the actual server is in place?

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago

    I feel GUIs complicate everything. You need graphics drivers and a display server and a compositor and a window manager etc... it's a pain and in the end you still have to open a console to type in commands for your actual self hosting. Not worth the effort in my opinion, and it's better to bite the bullet and get used to the terminal and ssh early.

    I recommend using something like tmux or screen, so you still have basic comforts like tabs and multi task. Once you get used to it you can configure it and add themes and plugins if you like. A modern tmux setup really feels like a desktop except everything is faster and it barely consumes any resources.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago

    I second the Debian recommendation, with one caveat: if ever you need to install software that is not maintained by Debian (I.e. it is installed using a command like make install instead of apt install) then you could run into significant problems.

    Debian uses a system (called APT) to manage the logistics of all your apps and libraries. This is wonderful until you add a program using a different method that APT doesn't know about. In that case you can "end up in dependency hell" where your system can no longer update or install new packages.

    Advanced users can work around this limitation to install things safely, but for a user just starting out I suggest to only ever install packages that exist in the Debian repositories (that is, can be installed with APT or one of its various frontends). This can mean the programs are a little outdated or not available.

    Debian has a document that explains this in greater detail, which I suggest every Debian user reads: Don't Break Debian

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