Umbrel OS
this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2025
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The command line is an exceptionally useful tool, you may want to spend a little time getting familiar with it and common command line tools that would probably make self hosting almost anything easier.
It's like wanting to learn to play guitar but not learning how to restring and tune it, sure it's not necessary but you're going to be overly dependent on others to do something you could learn for yourself with a little time and patience, and it will probably broaden your perspective on what you can do once you do get familiar with how to pipe commands together and combine basic tools into something more sophisticated and complex.
I misread that as "self-loathing" and the answer was obvious.
The learning curve might be a little high in some regards, but you may want to try NixOS. There are quite a few services ready to enable and customize for self-hosting, and the design makes updating packages fairly simple.
To be clear, NixOS is not a "simple" solution, but it does work well for self hosting.
NixOS doesn’t have a curve, it’s a fucking wall 😆
How is that useful to OP who asked for something "without terminals"? Unless that was a joke.
Because I've been using Arch Linux for 15 years and live in the terminal, but even though I like the idea of NixOS, it's not only scary because it is alien and I have neither motivation nor enough free time to learn a parallel world and gain non-transferable skills for a niche solution. And that with being interested in what NixOS is doing.
I would say it is horrible advice to a novice, unless you want to scare people away from learning terminals and configs and managing an operating system without GUI tools.
😄 Sometimes it's hard to remember the differential
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
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
I love the command line. A terminal window is always open on whatever computer I'm using at the moment, even when I was running Windows.
But I also like having a dashboard to see what's going on, all right in front of me. I have ADHD, and if I can't see it, then I will forget it exists. I use command line to handle more granular tasks, and have various UIs to help me handle other things, like Proxmox (obvious), Dockge (docker stacks), OMV (NAS), Cockpit (all of my computers have this, really good for remote control), and a few other things I'm forgetting.
Mint or Ubuntu is like Windows but better.
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 ;)
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.
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