I have an old laptop that I want to turn into a server, but I want it to be as seamless as possible. I don’t have any knowledge in web hosting, so I’ll use whatever distribution makes it easiest.
Also willing to venture outside of Linux territory to try those NAS-like operating systems. I just want things to work.
I called it old, but the laptop in question actually has decent specs. I want to host a personal searx instance, a forum, nextcloud, and, well, I’d also like to run single-user fediverse instances but I heard that they’re very hard to manage and update so I’m still not sure about that.
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Debian works well for a server.
In this vein, try the Armbian x86-64 generic image. It’s a great distro.
Ubuntu Server (Or really just Ubuntu) is probably going to be the easiest in terms of package support, general support, and usability. It’s pretty straightforward and there’s infinite tutorials for everything you could possibly want to do
I always find Ubuntu super disorganized and bloated with outdated packages causing tons of problems. I’d recommend something a little more bleeding edge but trim such as Alpine Linux or even FreeBSD.
Yep. Could consider Lubuntu too.
OPs usecase is for server. afaik gui is useless for that.
Debian is the classic server choice. If you don’t have any server administration experience, I’d consider it just for that reason: there should be a ton of resources available. If you want something else, any RPM-based distro (like Fedora Server, CentOS Stream, Rocky Linux, or even RHEL) could be another option, with Rocky Linux probably being the best choice out of those.
Alternatively, I’d consider NixOS or Alpine. NixOS is what I use on most of my servers, however both have attributes that might make them worse for a beginner. NixOS uses a custom programming language to configure the operating system, while Alpine is much more minimal than most other server distributions. On the off chance that you have experience with a functional language like Haskell, though, NixOS might be the best choice, since it having a unified configuration for the whole system makes it very convenient for hosting usecases.
I’d also like to note that I run both a single-user Mastodon and Lemmy instance, and find them both fairly easy to manage. There’s also GoToSocial, which is specifically designed to be easy to deploy.
Have you considered installing Proxmox? That way you can then test as many distros as possible and even play a bit with containers. I configured it recently and I’m having a lot of fun being able to take snapshots and then doing crazy things with an easy way to recover from my failed experiments.
OpenBSD.
if it’s a really old laptop, Ubuntu might be overkill, spec-wise. In that case i would suggest Alpine Linux, it’s super lightweight and a really good distro for server use.
Hard agree here. I’ve got a Raspberry Pi running so much crap on it in Docker that I’m always afraid the CPU and RAM are going through the roof but it’s usually super low on resource usage. It runs my smart home too so any strain on resources I’d imagine would be pretty obvious.
Can you run Alpine on a Raspberry Pi? In that case, I might consider it
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Try UnRaid!
checked out their website, and it seems great!
It is so easy.
It’s all built on slack so the core of it runs on potato.
The idea is you whack it on a USB and boot off that. All your drives become an array for UnRaid and you can easily generate a swarm of dockers or VMs to do whatever you want.
They have a massive catalog of docker apps ready to rock, including a WefWef Lemmy client!
Try running either Armbian or Linux Mint XFCE if your goal is a fast, stable, lightweight distro.
I’d throw an option out for Suse but if you really want as little OS as possible Arch Linux.
I actually started of with arch on my server, and recently moved to Debian. In my opinion, Debian is way more suitable for a server, especially if you want things to “just work”. Especially when installing Nextcloud, I noticed how much more Debian does for you compared to arch, which makes the entire process way easier.
Same reason I’m on Suse now as well. I got tired of tinkering all the time.
