Selfhosted

39435 readers

7 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
No spam posting.
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

What OS is best for a beginner to degoogle? (lemmy.world)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

17 comments fedilink hide all child comments

So I have a retired but still very serviceable PC that I intend to use as my first home server. I gave two basic goals in self-hosting:

Host family media through Jellyfin, etc. This would include tv, music, and possibly books as well. Many of these will be managed through the Arr apps.
Degoogle my phone - I'm beginning by replacing Photos with Immich, but hope to also use Home Assistant, backup other phone data such as messages media, shopping lists, etc. I hope to replace Google storage/backup with Proton Drive.

So the question is what OS should I set up to run that? My proof of concept was an immich container running in xubuntu on an old laptop. I chose Xubuntu because I like the availability of documentation and community support for Ubuntu like distros, but wanted a lower powered alternative for the older device.

It seems to be working well, but I've had a few hiccups trying to update it, and I've heard that once you get into it, Linux distros like Ubuntu are not very user friendly for self-hosting as a beginner.

So is it better on the whole for a beginner to have a popular distro with lots if documentation and step by step guides, or to have a purpose-built OS like TrueNAS that might be more straightforward, but with less support?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

If it's just a server, Alpine and docker will do most things with good reliability and security.

Otherwise I've actually always used void and arch. While those aren't typical choices for a server, it shows that it's hard to go wrong.

Choose a distribution that appeals to you and it'll work great.

For this use case, alpine sounds good.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Honestly, alpine is a great distro, but not really something I would recommend for a beginner. There is less documentation and troubleshooting guides out there tailored to this distro than for example debian or ubuntu.

I would either recommend using Debian or a derivative of that if they want to get their toes wet. Alternatively a complete solution with GUI tools for if they just want to start using their own stuff now.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

Yeah I hear that, good point.

Arch has great documentation but also a bit more config.

I would vote for Fedora over debian though. Debian packages are so far out of date that it becomes a pain and copr works quite well.