Cross posted to r/homeserver
proxmox. i fine its very easy to work with and manage. also proxmox backup server is amazing
Wow I just realized that I’m not backing up any of my Proxmox vms Thanks for the reminder friend!
Arch. No Window Managers or Desktop Environments. Its easy to work with when no extra fluff is installed.
Debian. All day, everyday.
Home Server: VMware ESXi NAS: Unraid
Debian. I use mostly docker containers and super easy to spin up and manage.
Debian, I wouldn’t pick another one.
Debian Stable. Clean, easy, and reliable. Upgrades smoothly without drama.
Debian, FreeBSD. Proxmox is awesome for hosting VMs, LXC, and Docker Containers (via a VM).
Debian
Proxmox 4 lyf
If you’re looking for a NAS and don’t want to invest on all disks right now, unraid. Otherwise truenas
I use TrueNAS, mainly because I wanted a solid storage solution. I don’t really need many VMs, so I’m happy to run jails for stuff I need.
I also run a small RPi4 server with a few docker containers (a secondary Syncthing server, TVHeadend server, etc).
If I had a need for VMs, I’d run Proxmox (as I have some experience with it).
Big fan of Truenas core and jails!
Denian stable, openSUSE Leap
Yup, Debian is stable and rock solid for years
If you want a beautiful front end for docker containers
CasaOS/ZimaOS Cosmos-server Unbrel
Otherwise
- proxmox
- truenas
- unraid
I think it really depends on what you intend to do with it… Many answers here will mention what they use but not why.
In my case I want to have various services installed in docker containers, and I have the skills to manage Linux in console. A very simple solution for me was to use a rock-solid, established Linux distro on the host (Debian stable) with Docker sourced from its official apt repo. It’s clean, it’s simple, it’s reliable, it’s easy to reinstall if it explodes.
Why containers (as opposed to directly on the host)? I’ve done both over several years and I’ve come to consider the container approach cleaner. (I mention this because I’ve seen people wondering why even bother with containers.) It’s a nice sweet spot in-between dumping everything on the host and a fully reproducible environment like nixOS or Ansible. I get the ability to reproduce a service perfectly thanks to docker compose; I get to separate persistent data very cleanly thanks to container:host mapping of dirs and files; I get to do flexible networking solutions because containers can be seen as individual “machines” and I can juggle their interfaces and ports around freely; I get some extra security from the container isolation; it’s less complicated than using VMs etc.