So I have a retired but still very serviceable PC that I intend to use as my first home server. I gave two basic goals in self-hosting:
- Host family media through Jellyfin, etc. This would include tv, music, and possibly books as well. Many of these will be managed through the Arr apps.
- Degoogle my phone - I’m beginning by replacing Photos with Immich, but hope to also use Home Assistant, backup other phone data such as messages media, shopping lists, etc. I hope to replace Google storage/backup with Proton Drive.
So the question is what OS should I set up to run that? My proof of concept was an immich container running in xubuntu on an old laptop. I chose Xubuntu because I like the availability of documentation and community support for Ubuntu like distros, but wanted a lower powered alternative for the older device.
It seems to be working well, but I’ve had a few hiccups trying to update it, and I’ve heard that once you get into it, Linux distros like Ubuntu are not very user friendly for self-hosting as a beginner.
So is it better on the whole for a beginner to have a popular distro with lots if documentation and step by step guides, or to have a purpose-built OS like TrueNAS that might be more straightforward, but with less support?
I used to run multiple containers with TrueNAS Scale through their apps system (not as a VM in TrueNAS) and it was very unstable. I constantly had to fix something and the apps had constant updates even though there were no updates to the apps itself. It was really annoying to work with. I switched to Fedora Server and it has been much better since.