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.
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I'm not trying to be unhelpful. My advice would be to steer into the terminal. Bite the bullet. I use arch and alpine for my servers but Fedora would be fine (but SELinux can be a pain with bund mounts)
Probably just go with Fedora with btrfs for snaps. It has lots of support and is a common choice for servers
Yeah ~~kind of~~ totally agree. Trying to self host without using the terminal would be like trying to drive a car without touching the steering wheel with your hands. It’s possible but dangerous and cumbersome.
Don’t let it scare you. Get something installed to let you build some VMs to play around without worries (Virtualbox, VM Workstation, parallels), and install a distribution like Debian, Ubuntu, Mint and start to play. To self host all you really need is learning some basic file manipulation (move,copy,remove), how to edit text files (vi,emacs,nano), and the basic directory structure. That will get you 90% of the way there. When you see things like awk, sed, grep ask an AI to explain it, they are actually useful for that. These sort of commands start getting into advanced things like output redirection and regex which can be EXTREMELY confusing. Heck I have a CS degree, been in IT for almost 30 years, and I’ve been using Linux since the mid 90s and some of that still confuses me. So basically don’t fret if it’s too confusing, you are totally not alone. Play, screw up, try to fix it, curse, read a lot, try again, realize it’s toast, start over. Honestly I think I just described my job 😂
How do you troubleshoot Alpine? The one time I tried (later needed to use Debian because the OS was not supported) I could almost only find ressources in conjunction with containerization.
Honestly, I've had little trouble. The Gentoo Wiki and Void Handbook have a lot of overlap with OpenRC and musl, respectively.
While the documentation could be improved, the overall experience has been quite good and very stable.
Maybe just a matter of skill issue with another distro (faimily).
Oh well. Maybe another time ;)
don't go with server variants of the OS. they are intended for boxes that work without display and keyboard, which you have. instead, install any normal distro you're familiar with. it's infinitely easier to fix something with the full GUI at your disposal.
this is just your first install, you will iterate, and through that process you'll get better and leaner, in terms of underlying OS. think of it as training wheels on a bike, you'll pull them off eventually.
wired connection only, leave wireless turned off, and assign it a static IP address.
don't do containerS, do one container first. figure out where you're gonna store the compose files, where it will store data, how you will back that data up, etc. then add another. does it fit into your setup? do you need to modify something? rinse. repeat.
casaOS, aside from it's murky background (some chinese startup or sumsuch, forgot?) doesn't provide that path forward nor allows you to learn something, too much hand holding.
good luck.
Keep in mind the reason why people generally dont run desktop environments on a server is because unessential software uses more resources and increases the chance of a system crash. I would highly reccomend learning how to use a terminal and installing fish (shell) is a great place to start.
I personally use Debian. For your case, you can install lightweight desktop environments such as XFCE.
Honestly from my point of view after reading your post, you don't have a terminal or operating system issue, it feels like you are new to self-hosting and don't know how to start configuring from scratch.
Ideally you want to look for documentations or keep asking for online help. For example, with installing docker, you would want to refer to this: https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/. Welcome to system admin life, where you spend more time reading/understanding than configuring.
Personally, you can even use AI Chatbot to help you with stuff, just be specific on the system you are on, the goal you are trying to achieve and the problem you are tring to solve.
Which brings me to answer your next point about CasaOS: It exists so that you can skip most of the 'system admin life' step. It skips almost all the setup you would have needed to do on a fresh machine, and just leaves configurations. The downside is usually it eats up more resources than a self-configured install since it comes with redundant features you are unlikely to use.
TLDR; Pre-configured OS such as CasaOS is a solid choice if you just want to set it up and be done with it. If you are here to really learn about system admin stuff, then pick any of the Linux Operating system (Debian-derivatives recommended) with a lightweight DE.
Happy self hosting :v
Okay, so CasaOS is easier to set up (but uses more resources and I won't learn sysadmin stuff) whereas using something like Debian is a bit harder to set up (but uses less resources and learn more!).
Think I might try CasaOS on my 11th gen laptop and plain Debian on my 6th gen laptop and see which I prefer
Maybe you might find home in one of those NAS ootimized distros like Openmediavault, truenas, unraid. If not CasaOS or old good Debian with portainer.
YUNOhost is designed for this. You can do almost everything graphically via the webadmin. Mine has been running for a couple of years and I'm very happy with it. I have email, XMPP (both of which were installed out of the box), a website, file sharing and a few other things. There are a tonne of apps available, including Fediverse instances, Nextcloud. It's a very cool thing to have available for making self-hosting more accessible.
YUNOhost
Early on sometime, I deployed Yunohost. At the time there were apps, but the catalog was sparse. I happened upon it again in a search for something else about a week or so ago. Wow! The devs have been really developing it at a cyclical rate. I was impressed. For someone just starting out and trying to get their toes wet, I could see Yunohost being a good starting point.
Half of the apps aren't functional but yes, there are a lot.
Umbrel OS
You can install some Linux distro and then install a docker management web UI like coolify. Requires little terminal knowledge. Though you should learn the terminal.
Try the Fedora Server distro, afaik it should come with Cockpit installed: https://fedoraproject.org/server/
I was in the same spot about 3 years ago and I started with Unraid. Got me into docker and dipping my toes into command line stuff.
Honestly though you're going to quickly outgrow your old laptops...
If you are mostly hosting files, open media vault has minimal command line, and it's mostly administered through a web admin. It's still fairly complex however, and I definitely recommend reading the manual thoroughly and sticking with easy tasks at first. https://www.openmediavault.org/
I went with Truenas Scale and was pleasantly surprised it needed no command line kung fu
Hey :) I'm not giving you any recommendations but want to give you my personal experience !
5 years ago I had absolutely no clue about Linux/CLI/networking/docker... You name it ! And I also wanted to repurposed and old laptop as a server.
The first distro I installed on my server was Debian ! Why? Because I remembered my brother said something along the line: "Every server infrastructure is run by Debian or a Debian derivative". So this sounded like the perfect thing to install as a server distro :) !
5 years later I'm still running Debian on this old laptop and it's going strong ! Never did it failed me except if I did something wrong over the CLI !
As you guessed it, you will need some degree of proficiency on the command line specially if you install your distro without a graphical user interface, which I would recommend... Yes, the CLI isn't easy to beginning with and you will do some mistakes that will need a full reinstall of your system... But before you learn to move, you learn to stay up right on your legs and this involves a lot a failing !!
It's not mandatory, you can install a lightweight GUI and take your time. There are a lot of application with good UI which will help you out ! However, not once did I regret to take the harder route and learned so many things along the way ! After this amount of time in the CLI, I can say I'm getting quite good In navigating my system, keeping it healthy and alive :p !
Okay, If it's a matter of time I get it ! We only have 24h a day and most of this time is already spend at work/school, family time, friends, sleep, eat ! If you're lucky enough to have 2 hours to spare to tinker arround, a UI is a good idea to keep a healthy balance between all your personal activities ! But keep in mind, both are thorny and have their fair share of issues and debug time.
Last words, have fun with your system :)
Just from the handful of OSs I've tried, I'd suggest Ubuntu desktop again.
As for docker, I'd say to get docker and docker compose setup. Once you're running in docker compose, adding machines is often as simple as editing some markup in a text editor.
But my final suggestion is to crawl before you walk before you run. Start slow in the terminal. Instead of using your file explorer, navigate directories using the terminal and then open the directory you need into the file explorer using the terminal.
Want a new file? Use touch. Want a new directory? Use mkdir. Eventually, it'll become annoying to open a file from your explorer when you could just open it from the terminal. Then, you'll get annoyed with text editors and want to reduce your context switches by using vim.
Also, --help is your best friend when trying to figure out commands. You got this! Feel free to send me a message if you wanna chat and have any questions when you're ready to start dipping your toes. I'm far from an expert, but I've made some progress of my own and eventually we might learn a thing or two together.
I honestly would use a headless Linux system with docker compose. You can find premade docker compose files.