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
I used Debian because I thought it’d be stable, but I’ve had a couple hitches so I’d use smth you’re familiar with
Debian is the correct answer.
Debian. Works, proven, stable. “The universal operating system”, called that for a reason.
Debian
you’re going to want stability for something like a server, and for me that meant debian
Use whatever distro your buddies use.
For me that was Debian.
Rock solid.
@FilthyShrooms From my point of view most Linux- or *BSD-OS will be a good choice.
I’m running rootless podman on Manjaro Linux, but for many people an Arch Linux based system can be problematic related to possible stability issues from rolling updates.
A Debian based distribution could be a better choice for many people, especially when the provided services are running as container or in another virtualized environment.
I run FreeBSD, primarily for the 10+2 HDD ZFS setup. I love it. Beehive for containers.
I am looking forward to fiddling with FreeBSD on a raspberry pi
Originally coming from free-level VMware before Broadcom happened, I really like Proxmox. Proxmox gives you a relatively easy to use web interface to “spin up” container services and VMs as needed. There are also community repos with plenty of pre-built containers for popular self-hosting services. I find this setup generally easier to use and maintain than Docker (tho I’m sure die-hard Docker fans heartily disagree). I really appreciate that I can update my services at will without waiting for someone to build an updated docker image first.
I am a bit of a fan of using Proxmox. It’s a bit complicated, but the fact that it allows you to strictly apportion your resources to specific tasks and then wipe and reinstall just that one section without affecting the others can be really fun and useful.
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 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.
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
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.
Debian is the most stable. If you find Debian boring, try Fedora Server, it comes with cockpit and podman pre-installed. Although, you can install cockpit in Debian too, it gave me some issues when doing something that required root.
Here’s a link to an old post of mine, check it out.
Use what your comfortable with. I run my server on arch because I’m familiar with it and know how to work it.
