I have been wanting to self-host recently I have an old laptop it’s a Toshiba satellite m100-221 sitting around it only has 4gb of ram, but I don’t know what is a good starting point for an OS for my home lab I discovered yunohost but heard mixed opinions about it when searching I would like lemmy’s opinion on a good OS for a beginner wanting to start a home lab I would prefer a simple solution like yunohost but would like it to be configurable it’s fine if it needs a bit of tinkering.
Without knowing what you actually want to do, I’d put Debian on it. Very good, very stable, very widespread OS with plenty of tutorials around for whatever you decide to do with it. Do a minimal installation and 4 GB RAM are plenty to play around with.
I second Debian because of the amount of information out there.
I use debian for my ancient media server. It’s great.
i use dietpi, which is built upon a minimal debian.
Even better when you’re already familiar with it. And I’d consider a media server to already be “selfhosting”.
Edit: Sorry, thought you were OP.
Yup Debian would also be my way of getting started.