What's the BEST home server operating system?

38 thoughts on “What's the BEST home server operating system?”

• Not windows.

• Kudos for this helpful vid! Ive experimented with Bluehost and A2 Web Hostinng, but Cloudways and TST20 cou pon are unbeatable.

• That is the best overview of so many versatile tools and solution. Thank you so much for you wonderful, hyper-Informative 😉 content.

• What does ubuntu give you that basic debian doesnt?

• Great video! Personnally I don't really like the idea of running systems that are administered using their own specific web interfaces like Proxmox/Truenas. I usually much prefer having a regular Ubuntu or Debian server as a bawe system which I can manage the way I want and host secondary systems with KVM / Virtmanager or Docker. To make it easier, Cockpit web interface with its zfs, vm, etc plugins makes it nearly as user friendly as proxmox or truenas for moderatelly simple use cases.

• Love the video!!! Thank you for the information. One solution I use in my set up is UNRAID as well as others you spoke about.

• What about xcp-ng? What is your thought on this? How about Harvester?

• Yeah Proxmox is the best by far.

• Please dress as Gru for one video

• I've started with Raspberry Pi some time back. But long story short: Proxmox and TrueNAS became my number 1. Raspberry is just to learn few things – not to go production on it.

• Gotta say, this was a fantastic video and I really appreciated the deep walk through on each option and why one might go with each of them. The fact that your choice wasn’t the choice you recommended for starting out, with an explanation of why, just really cemented your credibility. Glad I came across your channel and you’ve earned a subscriber!

• Thank you for sharing the knowledge you have gained.

• These youtubers should be banned. 17 mins of video and zero content.

• You forgot about two things. One is that you can also manage bare Linux machines with things like Cockpit or Webmin. Second – WindowsVM@linux needs very costly license because using consumer keys (even totally legal ones) is against their license (physical machines only)

• Hey Christian, the only thing that pushes me away from Proxmox is the OS update, updating Proxmox is not seamless 🙁 any suggestions?

• Sorry for the long comment. Since I am planning on expanding my home lab to include a NAS for my local storage and backups, and Being a Sophos home user, I thought that running an SMB file server on a Linux distro (instead of freeNAS/Synology) would offer greater security from malware, since I have the option to use the free Server Protection feature that Sophos offers that installs Sophos Antivirus on current Linux distros and monitors file activity for malicious behavior and viruses.

• Great vídeo as an introduction for setting home servers. Hypervisors Proxmox and NAS (Network Attached Storage)

• I wanted to love Proxmox, unfortunately, it doesn’t support most sfp+ cards and makes it hard to get 10GB network setup. Got back to VMware and everything is working perfectly fine…

• I think it really comes down to the definition of full crazy. If your job is in IT or potentially in IT. I think it makes great sense to deploy several servers depending on if your field is more cyber security based/network based or more systems administrator/programming based or you're a dev ops guy. I personally have a bunch of proxmox VMs but i know you wont see proxmox in the wild so I would spin up esxi just to keep the vmware navigation skills sharp. At the end of the day our interests will be attracted to a certain aspect of IT and ultimately what we alliw for ourselves is subject to budget and availability.

  But really this is just a really round about way to say the best way to do something is get all the things xD

• Microsoft uses Linux for it's back end systems.

• thanks a lot for your videos man.. they are very helpful.. quick question.. will you use Proxmox in production?

• Thanks for the recommendations!

• Team Debian!

• As a devops engineer I deploy a ton of vms and containers and if I'm given the choice, 90% of the time they're running the current Ubuntu LTS. No licensing issues or drama, very well put together and easy to hack into and excellent cloud provider support.

• 8:25: Which program did you used ? Thx!

• currently im gonna try debian + ansible but if that ends up taking too long ill probably use unRAID/freenas/truenas.

  great points about constantly swapping distros/oses

• I am a little bit surprised that you don't even mention UNRAID as an operating system for Homelab. In my opinion UNRAID is the best all in one Homelab OS since => there are much more applications and comtainer solutions than Truenas has. Furthermore, the management of the system itself and the shares are much more easy than other OS. In the meanwhile Unraid is supporting natively ZFS. The only disadvantage could be it cannot manage huge storages in Petabyte size like Truenas and is may be not as fast as Truenas but enough fast for 10Gbe network. Moreover the virtualization in unraid is very easy like in proxmox and it works in compare to truenas. Truenas is really may be the better option if you want to have a professional only big storage OS without virtualization. But in this case you cannot call it as Homelab.

• I have been using FREENAS/TrueNAS core for about 6 years now I have considered going to scale seeing as core is using freeBSD and scale uses Debian which just works with 90% of the hardware.

• my home server for ssh and apache is running linux-mint but i am also using it as a media center for watching movies or emulators on the projector. and it has a direct connection to a synology NAS with 4 drives. for all my photos from my photography hobby. as you said there is no perfect solution. but this works amazingly well.

• I'm using Windows 10.

• is this wifi or cable conect

• I run debian when I need stablity (databases mysql postgesql) in the app/ I run rocky linux ( now) as I like the way how they cluster things / I use alpine for all my web apps. I use debian for my k8s cluster and whaver means docker.. I have windows server to run AD services ( only windows machine/server in my home network)… All that works in esxi and sec host proxmox … Of course truenas for storage… I use pfsence as a lab router as well as a home router…

• Just want to let you and the algo know that this is super valuable content. Thank you!

• Hyper v server gets a lot easier to manage when you install Windows Admin Center on it, gives you a web UI so you're not required to have Windows 10 pro to get a gui or rely on the terminal.

• 终于作了决定，我要把我的home lab 换成PVE。目前是OMV。

• Best is vmware or hyper-v rest is wate of time

• Linux is not the best choice for a server, linux is the only choice for a server

• Personally I love Ubuntu. I've tried a lot of options over the years. I've been using it for about 12 years now. I still use windows on my main machine though.

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