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?
Windows Server 2022
Not that I’m using them, but what about these two?
thanks! Maybe I could check out cockpit and portainer too…
Might want to use dockge instead of portainer.
https://github.com/louislam/dockge
Portainer has… Weird issues.
What kind of issues?
Ive had several stacks just fail to deploy in portainer.
Copy pasting the composes then running them as vanilla yamls or in dockge they worked entirely fine.
Can’t remember the exact compose files but I remember they were Linux server containers. No idea what the issue is/was since its been years.
dockge
Not knocking Dockge, but I have to say I was underwhelmed coming from Portainer. It obviously works for a lot of people, so I might just be ‘special’.
I mean its not really meant to be special. Just a good management frontend.
I meant that I’m special as in incompetent, not that the app was special.
Ubuntu. Many will disagree but, Debian flavors are a way smoother experience from the start and Ubuntu has a ton of community support. You’ll rarely find an issue no one found and solved before you.
Anything but Ubuntu for the most part
Mint, Fedora, Rocky or whatever else
Would absolutely not recommend fedora as a first distro.
Fedora better than Ubuntu in a lot of ways
Also with Fedora 42 there is a entirely new installer so it is much easier to setup.
It is a testing ground for new features. It is literally one of the worst beginner distros. Shit breaks constantly. That is not good for beginners. Just because you like it doesn’t make it good for beginners.
We’re not talking about what distros are good. We are talking about what is good for beginners.
Have you even used Fedora recently? It is well tested and focused on being beginner friendly. That wasn’t always the case but it changed a few years ago.
I’m done arguing. Not gonna respond to whatever fedora fanboy nonsense to follow.
Ubuntu holds around 30 percent of the Linux desktop market. Fedora sits around 1 to 2 percent. Ubuntu focuses on Long Term Support stability, massive community documentation, seamless hardware driver support, and minimizing breakage for new users. Fedora deliberately pushes bleeding-edge kernels, experimental libraries, and rapid changes that regularly introduce breakage. Beginners do not need the newest kernel version or experimental features. They need stability, predictability, easy troubleshooting, and access to a massive community when things go wrong. Fedora is excellent for intermediate users who know how to fix their own problems. It is irresponsible to recommend a testing ground distro to someone who is still learning how to use the terminal.
If Fedora were actually a good beginner distro, it would dominate beginner spaces like r/linux4noobs, It does not. Fedora is respected, but it is not designed for beginners. Even Fedora’s own documentation assumes technical competence that a first-time Linux user will not have.
It is objectively not a good distro for beginners. Not even Fedora thinks it’s a good distro for beginners. Your arguments make no sense. I certainly don’t care to hear anymore of them.
Good day.
It is ok to admit you are wrong. Fedora wasn’t always the project it is today and at one point it was purely for testing. I get the impression that you’ve either never used Fedora or haven’t used it in a very long time.
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/
Not everyone needs the latest stable of everything. That’s ok but I also didn’t just list Fedora. It is just a option to consider if you want a up to date system that’s well tested.
Ubuntu has gone downhill a lot in the last decade. I no longer can recommend it. Yes there is a large community, but they make too many questionable decisions and so doing anything “different” will be hard.
Yeah, I don’t recommend settling on it, but I stand by learning on it. It will be the most frictionless. It’ll ease you into resolving hairy problems in a way that is less discouraging, because they’re not quite as hairy.
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? Usemkdir. 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,
--helpis 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 can recommend you Debian, since it’s the “default” for many servers and has a lot of documentation and an extremely big userbase.
For web interfaces, I can recommend you, as you already mentioned, CasaOS and Cockpit.
I used CasaOS in the beginning and liked it, but nowadays, I mostly use Cockpit, where I have the feeling that it integrates the host system more, and allows me to do most of my maintenance (updating, etc.) quite easily.
CasaOS is more aesthetic imo, and allows you to install docker containers graphically, which is better for beginners.
I personally do my docker stuff mostly via CLI (docker compose file) nowadays, because I find it more straightforward, but the configuration CasaOS offers is easier to understand and has nice defaultsThanks, that was really helpful :D
I’ll try CasaOS then, and later maybe I could move to Debian once I get better at the command line!
CasaOS isn’t an OS, it’s just the web interface you install afterwards you have Debian or whatever running
For what it’s worth, CasaOS isn’t actually an operating system. It absolutely works as an easy way to install and manage your self-hosted apps if you aren’t comfortable with the command line, but you still need to have a working Linux installation.
Yunohost is kind of similar as far as making things easier, but it operates as a standalone OS, so might be more what you’re looking for.
You can install some Linux distro and then download a docker management web UI like coolify. Requires little terminal knowledge. Though you should learn the terminal.
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.
for more info for those interested
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.
User makes specific request
Top comment is ‘Nah you don’t want that, just learn terminal yo’
Fuck every member of the linux community
User asks specifically how to do terminal based things without using the terminal. Fuck you, specifically.
Windows has IIS which has a UI
There’s a reason that’s not very popular outside of corporate intranets.
And you wonder why your desktop adoption is and always will be shit
We’re talking about servers here. Linux is the market leader in server software by an absolutely enormous margin.
It staggers me how dense you are, but the insight into how fanatics lose track of the plot is worth the pain of admission
The thread is about self-hosting with as little CLI as possible, and the only functioning difference between most ‘server’ and ‘desktop’ linux distros is just a prepackaged gui
I mean if that’s what you think, I can tell you don’t work in the industry. Desktop editions generally have more than just a “prepackaged GUI” on top of a server edition.
- Server editions generally have text based installers. This might not seem like a big deal, until you’re installing on a system that doesn’t have any graphics, just a serial console.
- They almost always have an easy way to do headless and network installations.
- They sometimes have additional security modules, like SELinux, different kernel boot parameters, or even different kernel versions. (Although this is less common nowadays.)
- They’re also missing an audio server (different than a GUI), and usually a print server.
- They can often be GBs lighter, which makes a difference when you’re installing on virtual machines with limited disk space.
- They sometimes use different file systems by default (like Fedora used to).
- They might create different swap setups.
- They usually have very different network defaults. Like, desktop editions usually have a firewall, whereas server editions usually don’t (or it’s not enabled by default).
- Server editions often include terminal tools that desktop editions don’t.
- They’ll sometimes have a different network manager (Ubuntu Server uses systemd-networkd while Ubuntu Desktop uses Network-Manager).
- Server editions almost never come with userland file mounting tools like gvfs.
- Sometimes (like in Fedora) a server edition will come with remote management solutions like Cockpit.
- The home directory skeletons will be vastly different on a server vs a desktop.
That’s just off the top of my head. I’m sure there are plenty more I could find.
Now, since you seem like you might accuse me of it, note that I did not say that a server edition and a desktop edition can’t be swapped back and forth by installing and removing packages and changing a bunch of config. They can. But, it’s not “just” some GUI stuff that makes a desktop edition, and it’s not “just” the lack of a GUI that makes a server edition. They are usually quite different.
Source: I’ve been a professional Linux server administrator for 16 years. But don’t take my word for it. Try it yourself. Install Ubuntu server, then run
sudo apt install ubuntu-desktopand see if it’s exactly the same as installing Ubuntu Desktop.Son I’ve been an IT professional since before the internet had pictures and have spun up more linux hosts than you’ve had fap sessions.
and see if it’s exactly the same as installing Ubuntu Desktop.
There is no way to convert a Windows Server into a desktop compatible device without recompiling significant portions of the source code, and at that point all you are doing is recapitulating Windows Desktop
There are several ways, though not trivial, to do that with linux, in both directions. I’ve literally done it.
It doesn’t matter what extra packages get bundled with the distro that at a fundamental level all versions of linux are the same thing under the hood
Desktop? This entire discussion is about server software
No, the entire discussion is about a user that doesn’t want to deal with CLI to self host
There’s really no meaningful difference between linux desktop and server distros like there is in windows, people just run them without the desktop environment to reduce overhead.
Yeah but all self hosting software is TUI, I mean sure you can use a GUI but at the end of the day you’ll need to use a terminal emulator to acturally run the software so there isnt much point in the overhead
What? Am I supposed to lie? For advanced tasks such as running server grade software you need to use a terminal, this is the case for every single operating system. FreeBSD, MacOS, and yes even Windows require knowledge of the terminal for advanced tasks such as running server grade software.
This is Lemmy, not the other place. Please be kinder. No need to abuse people trying to help, especially when OP did mention they wouldn’t mind learning if its easy enough.
Sorry no, I am medically incapable of being kinder to linux fanatics
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’m not very good with the command line)
Me either so I take a lot of notes about commands and command sequences. Also, I find that Grok is pretty decent at explaining commands. AI is a wonderful tool, but you also need to do your due diligence in ascertaining whether AI has given you the correct information. I would not copy/paste random commands into a production server, but rather I have a small test server for that kind of stuff. Once I have the command, tested, and understand the command, I can then use that in a production environment.
In as much as I love a good WUI, you will have to learn some cli, it’s just inevitable, especially in a headless environment. It may seem daunting at first because there are literally thousands of commands and command sequences. I honestly doubt if even the geekiest nerds on the planet know all by heart. For each command sequence, there are probably hundreds of ways to compose the same command. I would admonish you to download Notepad ++ and start keeping notes on the commands you use. Later on, the fun part is looking back on your notes to see all the commands you now know and what they do.
Core utilities (like ls, cd, cat, etc.) from projects like GNU Coreutils provide around 100-200 commands. Additional tools from packages (e.g., grep, awk, sed) and system utilities (e.g., systemctl, iptables) can add hundreds more. On a system with many packages installed, running compgen -c | sort -u | wc -l in a Bash shell might show 2,000–10,000+ unique commands, depending on the setup.
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.
I went with Truenas Scale and was pleasantly surprised it needed no command line kung fu
TrueNAS scale seems like the perfect option, the only downside is that my old laptops don’t meet the hardware requirements
Like RAM?
Not that important. I ran it with ¼-½ of the recommended RAM (1GB RAM per TB)
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.
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
