this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2025
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I am trying to use my old laptops for self-hosting. One has a 6th gen Intel Core i3 (4GB ram), the other has an 11th gen Intel Core i5 (8GB ram). I have previously tried both ubuntu server and desktop but couldn't get it to work well. For the former I found it difficult to remote ssh and the latter I had difficulty installing Docker containers. (I'm not very good with the command line)

I would like to find an OS that is easier to setup with less of a neccesity for the command line (I would still like to learn how to use it though, I don't want to get rid of it entirely!). I've heard of CasaOS, is that a good option? It seems quite easy to use. What about other alternatives?

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 12 hours ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago)

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 😂

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 15 minutes ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 18 seconds ago

Maybe just a matter of skill issue with another distro (faimily).
Oh well. Maybe another time ;)