this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2025
74 points (88.5% liked)

Selfhosted

46392 readers
841 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:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. 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.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

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

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
74
What OS should I use for self-hosting that doesn't require extensive terminal knowledge? (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
118 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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?

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

i tried CasaOS for a quick minute. its decent and just has the basics like setting up any disks and then has an app store. its really just a front end for docker and you can manually input the details of any docker containers that arent in the store

ive mostly been running docker stuff on my Synology nas. cant think of the model number now, 218+ i think, but any of the "plus" models will let you run docker. its very similar to Casa, no messing around with command line stuff. ive been self hosting for 10 years now and never touched the command line so i dont know what people are on about here saying you will have trouble

dietpi is another thing ive used on a few devices, mainly small SBCs and raspberry pi's, but i think they might have a version that you can install on anything. its basically just debian, and it has a sort of a wizard that helps set up various things like set up disks and install apps. its headless though so no GUI unless you install one, and the wizard is run from the terminal but youre not having to type any commands at least

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 hours ago

I am very much a Windows user and my journey went like this:
Raspberry Pi with OMV -> SSH on OMV -> Mostly Terminal on OMV -> Docker + Portainer to deploy containers -> Transition to docker-compose -> Setup my own VM with Debian completely in the CLI (excluding the first setup of the VM)

I use Linux (primarily Debian because of Raspberry. I don't lile what I hear about Ubuntu) usually for VMs/servers and Windows as the client OS

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 hours ago

Mint or Ubuntu is like Windows but better.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 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 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 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 6 hours ago

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] 4 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

I guess you could install cockpit (via Terminal, sorry, but it's pretty straightforward and there are good guides). After that, you could use the cockpit web interface to deploy docker/podman containers. It's a bit clunky sometimes, but it does the job purely in UI.

You can also manage updates, backups, etc via cockpit if you install the required modules.

As base, I'd use any stable Linux distro that's reccomended for server use.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 hours ago

https://cockpit-project.org/

for more info for those interested

[–] [email protected] 6 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago) (1 children)

I believe all of these are actually just running Debian as the actual OS underneath, but they give you a webui that makes deploying apps easier.

Of these three, I like the look of Cosmos the most. Seems to be security focused and comes with a reverse proxy and a built in SSO solutions. That’s something that’s usually a pain in the ass to set up yourself.

There’s technically that stupid ass LTT OS but I’m purposely leaving that one out.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 15 hours ago

Cosmos does look quite good. TrueNAS can't run on my old laptops so HexOS was never really an option

[–] [email protected] 2 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

I went with Truenas Scale and was pleasantly surprised it needed no command line kung fu

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

TrueNAS scale seems like the perfect option, the only downside is that my old laptops don't meet the hardware requirements

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

Like RAM?
Not that important. I ran it with ¼-½ of the recommended RAM (1GB RAM per TB)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 hours ago

I tried installing an ISO and it black screened. weird.

load more comments
view more: next ›