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.

  • billwashere@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    3 days ago

    Start with docker. Any OS will do. Most Linux distros are better but I run docker on Mac, Linux, Windows (not a lot in windows since I despise Microsoft but it does work).

    The great thing about docker is it is very portable, modular, and easy to get back to a known state. Say you screw something up, just revert and start over. It’s also very easy to understand in my opinion. It’s like all the benefits of virtualization with much less over head.

    • mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      1·
      3 days ago

      Yeah, my only note is that Docker on Windows is… Kinda fucky? It uses WSL to run Linux in the background, which means that the volumes it creates aren’t easily accessible by Windows. If your container requires editing a config.json, for instance… That can be daunting for a newbie on Windows, because they won’t even know how to find the file.

      You can work around this by mounting your volumes directly to a C:\ folder instead, but that’s something that many tutorials just completely skip past because they assume you already know that.