Hey there. I have for the past year tried myself with some selfhosting of mainly a personal Nextcloud Instance. I also installed and used an RTSP-Server for Livestreaming, Traccar for Live-GPS sharing and Recording and a Paperless-NGX Server and Jellyfin. I use many of those Services daily.
Currently for my OS I am using Ubuntu 22.04, but I am not happy with my Setup. It’s difficult to setup, because I am not the most skilled in everything Linux and Serveradminstuff.
My Nextcloud Instance is just running without Docker, some Services run with Docker and some with Docker Compose. I try to use reverse Proxies but can’t get some things to work. (I use Nginx) (I ofcourse have a Domain as well with subdomains for everything)
So, my Question is: Is there a more Userfriendly and/or streamlined Approach or Server/OS that I could give a try and use?
It is all currently running and mostly secure, but I just wish to make upkeep and stuff like that easier for myself.
Personally, I think Ubuntu is the most friendly distribution when you’re starting out, just because there are many tutorials written for it. I also think more things work out-of-the-box than on RedHat-based distributions.
Another distro doesn’t magically fix difficulty for a custom setup. You can checkout other distros and see if maybe you like how they are laid out and how their package managers work, but the general config portion of deploying your apps is going to be the same regardless. Something to consider is how are you getting help for your setup? Is it some content creator you follow who generally does their videos/guides on ubuntu so that is how you figured everything out? Do you have friends or family who use it? If your source of knowledge and help is familiar with ubuntu, it is best to stick with it so you continue to have that resource. I can fumble around most distros, but if you want specific help, you are much better off asking me about specific issues inside an RPM based distro. I imagine others are similar in that they have generally applicable knowledge and a huge amount of specific distro knowledge since that is generally what they use.
I run Debian for all my homelab servers: stable, fast, (community) support, and secure.
I go the Debian route as I find it much less bloated than Ubuntu, which I started out with when I moved to Linux. When I say bloated I mean extra packages I feel are not needed, not annoying or junk packages like that. Ubuntu is pretty good about reviewing packages before including them in the base install. I like installing just the packages required.
I run my Nextcloud instance in a Docker container on my file server.
Agreed with others on here about Ubuntu. I have one server that I threw a bunch of stuff on and spent many hours messing with the nginx configuration file before everything was working correctly (Nextcloud, another website, and a VoIP thing). Changing the OS won’t make it any easier since the biggest hurdle is getting the configs right…
For Nextcloud I would choose something which has snaps and here the Ubuntu is the original snaps one. I would do that because the snop for Nextcloud is amazing. I’ve been running it for a couple of years now and it updates itself always without any problems, it’s that good.
Especially if you’re not so skilled at administrating then Ubuntu is nice because all the how-to’s are written for it.
Server 1: Gigabyte BRIX w/ Debian 11
- Home Assistant
Server 2: Asus Mini Desktop w/ Ubuntu 22.04 Docker:
- Portainer
- PiHole
- Roundcube
- Monica
- Nextcloud
- Dozzle
- Bitwarden
- Tandoor Recipes
- Log Analyzer
- Plex
- Ombi
- Prowlarr
- Radarr
- Sonarr
- Readarr
- Lidarr
- SABNzbd
Native:
- GlusterFS
- Fail2Ban
- iPerf3 Server
- Keepalived (AWS hot standby for some services)
I saw that something like Ansible-NAS might be an easy and safe Solution?
