Self-Hosted Main

proxmox. i fine its very easy to work with and manage. also proxmox backup server is amazing

Debian. I use mostly docker containers and super easy to spin up and manage.

Arch. No Window Managers or Desktop Environments. Its easy to work with when no extra fluff is installed.

Debian Stable. Clean, easy, and reliable. Upgrades smoothly without drama.

Debian

Debian. All day, everyday.

Debian, I wouldn't pick another one.

Debian, FreeBSD. Proxmox is awesome for hosting VMs, LXC, and Docker Containers (via a VM).

ESXi 8 with ISCSI shared storage. Love it.

Used Unraid for many years and moved to TrueNAS Scale, mainly due to lack of raid performance and bitrot.

Really happy with TrueNAS Scale and specially K8s.

FreeBSD with its jails

I use Fedora.
Why not Promox or unraid or any of those? Because I didn't see a personal benefit to it over Linux+libvirt+qemu (I'm sure there is a benefit, I just don't care enough to find out) Why not Arch/Debian/Ubuntu/etc? Because I partially use it as a way to learn or practice things from work and I want to stick as close to RHEL as possible.

Proxmox 👍👍👍

Anything that can run docker works for me.

Clean Debian + Docker w/ portainer, without installing anything extra on it. SOLID.

• Device support is great for older enterprise stuff

• Stable as it goes.

• Easy to find solution for problems you may come across due high userbase.

Currently running 1 server. Ubuntu, with docker because I'm not doing a ton, but I don't want to have to take down my pi-hole if I need to reboot jellyfin. etc.

RHEL 9 for all my servers home and abroad. I have a few vms that run with kvm and I use docker for everything else that I can

If you’re looking for a NAS and don’t want to invest on all disks right now, unraid. Otherwise truenas

Ubuntu server, everything on it runs with docker, nothing beside docker is installed, because of this i use rolling release instead of LTS

I really wanted to self host so I wrote my own OS, from scratch.

Fedora Kinoite + podman

Home Server: VMware ESXi NAS: Unraid

VMware esxi. The only one I tried, and it works amazing.

Proxmox, truenas

Ubuntu server, some bash scripts, and a docker install. KISS

I don't have much of a homeserver, its more of an experiment - but I have Fedora IoT as hypervisor OS running a Open Media Vault guest and another Fedora IoT VM for container services.

I'm a big fan of Fedora's Ostree setup, and have used Silverblue on the desktop for a while now, so IoT makes a lot of sense for me.

Ubuntu LTS server. I chose it because it's got good support both in community and enterprise support. Also it's pretty simple to use and almost forgot it's got zfs built in.

NixOS

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).

Proxmox 4 lyf

Denian stable, openSUSE Leap

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.

Arch, because I've always had a better experience with it than Ubuntu, be it server or desktop. I also daily drive it on my desktops.

It's so much easier to setup. Only with Docker and MergerFS it's a command and easily updatable, instead of the PPA setups or bash installs you have to do on Ubuntu. The wiki is still the best.

And it's way easier to maintain when there's less stuff.

Alma, Talos, OpenBSD

TrueNAS scale. Why: my main concern is backup and data protection, and TrueNAS offers just that. On top of that it's flexible enough to build a media suite on top of it, and it's easy to manage. I could have also gone unRAID, but since trueNAS is free and offer a bit better protection imo (at the cost of flexibility), I picked that

I used unraid last year, excellent experience learning how to use docker + vm in a user-friendly interface.
Now I use debian (installed via debootstrap) headless (docker only).

I went from freenas to unraid and couldn't be happier.

Unraid has a ton of really amazing features, it's super easy to use, the docker support is great (freenas didn't have docker support when I left), the parity drives are magic, and just being able to slap random disks of any size in your NAS is great.

I've had a few issues with freenas, but I've never had a single issue with unraid. That shit just works.

Edit:

I have a live stream porn downloader, that'll watch when people come online and start capturing the stream. I don't want this to be part of my system and putting strain on it, so with unraid I'm able to put disks in my system and use a plugin called unassigned devices, which allows me to add them to the system, but have them be separate from my main array.

That's why I just love unraid. The flexibility is great.

Truenas for the nas, proxmox for everything else

Proxmox, TrueNAS, Ubuntu server.

Proxmox, unraid, pihole ftw

I was an ESXi fan for over a decade until I found proxmox.

Now I use a combination of VMs and Linux containers.

I use containers for:

Pihole, Ubiquity WiFi Controller, Plex, Audio Bookshelf, imfluxdb, etc. And VMs for Home Assistant and Untangled.

https://ramblingnonsense.substack.com/p/a-journey-from-esxi-to-proxmox-in

NixOS. Only been running it on that server for a couple of weeks now, but so far I'm happy with it.

I like being able to manage almost every aspect of the system from a single declarative configuration file.

I don't do any fancy NAS and/or RAID stuff though. Just the OS living on an nvme, and a logical volume running across two spinning disks. If I need direct file access I use scp, but the storage is more for jellyfin and a syncthing node.