I have an old laptop that I want to turn into a server, but I want it to be as seamless as possible. I don’t have any knowledge in web hosting, so I’ll use whatever distribution makes it easiest.

Also willing to venture outside of Linux territory to try those NAS-like operating systems. I just want things to work.

I called it old, but the laptop in question actually has decent specs. I want to host a personal searx instance, a forum, nextcloud, and, well, I’d also like to run single-user fediverse instances but I heard that they’re very hard to manage and update so I’m still not sure about that.

  • @Amax@lemmy.caEnglish
    5•2 years ago

    Have you considered installing Proxmox? That way you can then test as many distros as possible and even play a bit with containers. I configured it recently and I’m having a lot of fun being able to take snapshots and then doing crazy things with an easy way to recover from my failed experiments.

  • @atomkarinca@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
    4•2 years ago

    if it’s a really old laptop, Ubuntu might be overkill, spec-wise. In that case i would suggest Alpine Linux, it’s super lightweight and a really good distro for server use.

  • @apatters@lemmy.mlEnglish
    3•2 years ago

    I would go with the regular desktop version of Ubuntu because while laptops work just fine as personal/small-scale servers, any idiosyncracies tend to be around stuff like sleeping, power management, what happens when you close the lid etc. Whether you’ll encounter any of that depends in part on the laptop make and model, but Ubuntu Desktop is probably the most polished distro out there in terms of handling those things. Edit: though maybe I’m wrong and Ubuntu Server would have better defaults around those sorts of things? Never tried running it on a laptop before.

  • @Nibodhika@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2•2 years ago

    My home server runs on a laptop that’s running Manjaro. Does that mean I recommend Manjaro? Nope, then why do I use Manjaro? Because it’s the same OS I have on my personal computer so it makes it easier to maintain two of the same than different OSs, so my suggestion would be whatever you’re using on your main rig, and if you don’t use Linux on it then whatever you feel more comfortable, there’s not going to be a major difference between distros in their capabilities, but there is going to be a major difference in your willingness to maintain a system you’re not familiar with.

  • @finsk@lemmy.mlEnglish
    2•2 years ago

    CentOS is a good OS for servers. It also has a friendly web interface on port 9090.

  • @CoffeeBot@lemmy.caEnglish
    2•2 years ago

    I’d throw an option out for Suse but if you really want as little OS as possible Arch Linux.

  • Vincent St. PierreEnglish
    1•2 years ago

    My home server is a Ubuntu install on a 2017 laptop. A lot of guides have been very useful.

    I installed several other tools, with Portainer, for a variety of imaged applications. With various containers I installed Jellyfin (for hosting old videos and converted media of mine), Calibre (for a digital library of textbooks from my history degree) and a few other tools. I’ve been half-tempted to host some WordPress sites, but I have yet to figure out nginx…