The Best Distro for Your Home Lab - And Other Home Lab Questions

So I have been home labbing for about two and a half years and over that time my home lab has gone through a series of transformations. I started off with a really simple computer and then I went off into a HP workstation and then that was overkill or at least it felt like it at the time and I moved to three Lenovo ThinkCenters which are like these little mini PCs and those weren't powerful enough so now I'm on an HP Victus which is just like a regular desktop that I'm using with NixOS on it. The point I'm trying to make is that everyone who starts their home lab usually finds themselves tweaking quite a bit as they go along and part of the reason why is because a lot of people who do home lab stuff are nerds, right? They're really interested in the technology and while they'll proclaim like I did that they're doing it to save money usually they're doing it because they're interested in the technology that goes behind it and maybe saving money is like an offshoot benefit. But for those people who haven't got into home labbing yet I find that they often have a few of the exact same questions and what I want to do today is talk about some of those questions and try to answer them as we go along. So I have 10 of them listed here and I think that these are quite common amongst people who are interested in home labbing maybe aren't as nerdy as those of us who are into it but are considering making the jump. So let's go ahead and talk about the first one and the first one is does it cost a lot? And this is a tricky question to answer simply because it depends and unfortunately you're going to hear me say the word depends a lot but let me explain what I mean. If you know what you want to self-host and you know what it takes to do so it can be astonishingly cheap to actually start your own home lab. You can even in this day and age where everything is super expensive you can hop on ebay or your local auction site or craigslist or whatever and find fairly reasonable used computers that can self-host quite a bit things like plex or jellyfin or home assistant whatever it is if you're only going to self-host a little bit of stuff and you know that going in getting a computer that suits those needs that is used can be fairly inexpensive I'm talking about one to two hundred dollars and after that most of the software is actually free you don't have to pay anything for it at all because most of the stuff that you would choose to host or to self-host is open source software so you don't actually have to pay for it however there's a reason why I said depends earlier if you are a nerd and you're like me you'll end up doing these transitions as you kind of figure out what you need to do or what you want to do or you get interested in other things and that can lead to further expenditures so if you go on youtube and you search for people who do home labbing stuff you'll see a lot of people who have obviously spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on their home lab and there's no actual need for that for the vast majority of people but you can tell that the reason why they've done it that way is because they really enjoy it and obviously they have the means to do so 99% of people aren't going to make it that far into the process but again it really does depend on what you're going to self-host and how far into it you're going to actually get the more into it you get the more expensive it's going to be so the next one relates to the idea of saving money because one of the reasons why people say they're going to get into home labbing and I know this is from personal experience because it was my reason is to save money you want to self-host your music so you can stop paying for spotify you want to start something self-hosting your movies and tv shows so you can stop paying for netflix and hulu and whatever right so the question is will it actually save you money and then again you guys gonna hate me but it depends it can if you are a budgeter if you go into it buy the lowest amount of hardware that you can get get it really cheap and you already have your media if you're self-hosting your media if that's the reason why you're getting into it it can be very very cheap and it can really save you a lot of money because you already have the stuff that you want to self host you you get yourself a little bit cheap hardware you put those things together with jellyfin or whatever and you serve it to all of your devices it can be very cheap and that simple but if you don't have all your media and you have to go out and buy it that can lead to quite a bit of expenditure and it will take you a long time you can you can get spotify for a lot of months before you make up for the cost of actually having to go out and buy all of the cds you could possibly want right so there is a little bit of a myth here that self-hosting and homelabbing will save you money it doesn't mean that it can't be possible or that it isn't even possible for most people but it's also something that you kind of have to average out over a period of time so i'm at a point now where most of my media is something that i own or i've gotten through certain places right and i spend very little money on actually buying new media that does save me money but it doesn't take into account the fact that i spent a lot of money getting that media in the first place eventually yes i will save money over time but it's going to take quite some time in order for me to get there before those two things kind of balance out so will you save money you can but again it depends i know that's going to be a horrible horrible answer for a lot of people but it's just kind of the way that it is the next one is one that i was actually really worried about is and it's does your home lab use a lot of electricity because electricity is very expensive and can lead to horrendous power bills if you overuse electricity and in my experience at least so far the answer to this question is no it won't take a lot of electricity now again we're going to have to add a little bit of a proviso on here simply that if you do decide to go out there and go all out and get yourself a huge server rack with a whole bunch of servers and nasas and all sorts of stuff your electrical bill is going to go up okay it will the more hardware you're going to run the higher your electricity bill is going to be but for most people who are just getting into this and you're just going to run one server whether it's a mini pc or hp victus like i'm doing or a lenovo think center or even an hp workstation like i had earlier there's just one computer chances are your electrical bill is not going to go up that much for me personally it was just a couple dollars a month it wasn't really all that noticeable in terms of the grand scheme of things and that was that even at a point where i'm also running a j bod and a whole bunch of other stuff so it didn't go up a ton but again you have to remember the more hardware you have the higher electricity bill is going to be but for most people it probably won't make that much of a difference the fourth one is do you need an actual server and the answer to this question is weird because it depends on how you define server what i'm talking about when i ask this question is do you need one of those things where you slide into a server rack and it's huge makes a lot of noise that's the question is a blatant no you don't have to have one of those now you can have one if you're really nerdy and you have a use for it have at it right but for most people if you're just getting into a small form factor mini pc of some kind will get you there a lot of people use laptops for their home home lab that works really well because it has a built-in screen and keyboard so you don't have to worry about ssh or anything like that in order to get into it if you don't want to so you can get by without an actual like real server chassis somewhere sitting in your house a lot of people do that a lot of people don't do that for me personally i don't have an actual server i just have like i said an hp victus it's just a regular desktop computer that uses like a mini atx board or something like that so it's it's still a server it's just not what you consider when you think of a gigantic server rack so a lot of people like well if i'm going to get into home labbing do i need an actual server the answer that is no you don't need one so the next one is an impossible question to answer but i'm going to try to answer it anyways and that is what is the best home lab distro the answer to this question is debian it absolutely is debian it's stable it doesn't require you to update it very often and you can just use it and kind of forget about it once you have everything set up if you don't come back to it for five or six months or even a year it's still gonna be just fine if you put arch or something like that on it or even open sousa you're gonna you know like tumbleweed you're gonna have some problems because that thing needs to be constantly updated now if you're into that kind of thing have at it but for most people debian or debian base or a distro like a boon 2 or whatever is perfectly fine now i've come around to nix os being a very good distro server but it's definitely not for everybody so take that how you will the sixth one on the list is what are the best apps to self-host and again this one is kind of hard to answer because it really depends on what you need for me personally i think that most people should start off with media type applications things like jellyfin or plex or home assistant if you're trying to get into the internet of things kind of thing your smart home whatever it happens to be my advice on this one isn't necessarily to give you a list of applications that you can go search for and host you can find those on the internet anywhere it's to start off small have a goal going in and know exactly where you want to start so if you were like me wanting to start your self-hosting your own media you want jellyfin i would avoid plex at this point in time because they're getting more and more expensive and their software is getting more and more crap so i highly recommend just starting with jellyfin you'll be happy that you did is it a perfect piece of software no but it's still very good and it's free they're never going to charge you a subscription fee or a lifetime subscription or whatever happens to be so i that's where if i were to start over again and i would recommend someone else starting in the same place get yourself jellyfin get yourself some media self-hosted there maybe you'll find other things to self-host and what i would say is to always make sure you have a reason for the self-hosting stuff it can be a bit of a rabbit hole if you go searching for a whole bunch of self-hosting apps that you don't actually need you'll eventually have a whole bunch of stuff that's just running on your server that you don't use always have a purpose with the apps that you choose the next one on the list is also app related and that is do you need to use docker the answer to this question is yes i i truly believe that the answer to this question is yes at least at first because docker is the one of the primary sources for applications in the self-hosting world it makes installing stuff phenomenally easy it makes it distro independent it makes it easy to upgrade things it makes it easy to access stuff from within the container on your host service you have to deal with a whole bunch of permissions and whole bunch of stuff like that it just makes it phenomenally easy now it's going to piss a lot of people off because there are alternatives to this like native packages and podman and nixos modules if you're on nixos right for me personally i would never change the fact that i started off learning home labbing through docker it's just it makes it so easy so my answer to this question is yes but other people will disagree just kind of as a side note where should you learn how to use docker go on youtube there are a lot of videos on there on how to use it it's there's some really good ones out there so there's that and kind of in that same vein the eighth question on this list is where do i find help the answer to that question again is i'm going to point everyone towards youtube there's a couple youtube channels out there techno tim is one uh hardware haven is another one raid owl is another one we had him on the podcast about six months ago or so they all do home labbing stuff now prefer i prefer hardware haven because he's more down to earth in terms of like what he does he has just he feels like he's a regular guy in terms of what he's self-hosting he doesn't he he has a server rack now but it's not like techno tim who has all this stuff right techno tim is much more aspirational like you're trying to get there you'll learn a lot of stuff but you're never going to be him right where hardware haven seems like it's much more attainable i at least i think so i'll put links to all their channels in the video description below youtube i think is the best place to do this but there are other places on the internet if you if you look down in the video description you'll also see some links to websites that i use that will point you towards applications and some how-tos and stuff like that so that'll help out as well also don't discount discord like like i know a lot of people don't like discord but if you come onto like my server and you ask for help with your home lab i'll be around i usually i can help a lot of people there's also about 2 000 other people on my server and a lot of them are very helpful so and there are other disco servers if you're not interested in mine i would just seek out people because a lot of people are in the same situation as you are in terms of figuring out how to do a home lab and they're often very helpful so the ninth question on this list is why should i start a home lab and the answer to this question is different for every single person simply because everyone has their own reasons some people do it just because they're nerds and they want to get into it right and that's a terrifically valid reason why another reason a lot of people do is because they want to save money this can as i said earlier be a kind of a slippery you know kind of sticky reason because sometimes you'll find that you just actually don't save any money at all because you get into it a little bit too far or whatever right other people it's because they simply want to self-host they want to get away from paying money to actual gigantic corporations and giving them their data right it's privacy it's protection against ai whatever it happens to be right they have a legitimate reason the thing about home labbing of course though is that you do kind of have to be interested in it before you get into it nobody like stumbles into starting a home lab at least i don't think so there's always a a reason behind it whether it's pure interest or saving money or there's an application that you want to use like jellyfin or whatever there's usually a reason and then as you know that reason starts small and then it kind of grows into more and all of a sudden you have yourself a server right that's more of the way that it usually works you have a small reason and it grows most people aren't just going to jump in because you know peer pressure or whatever some people will but not everybody the last question on the list is what should you learn first and what technologies should you learn so there are two things that you should learn if you're going to get into this i highly recommend actually there's three let me let me say there's three the first one is ssh you're not going to be very happy if you start a home lab without learning how to do a little bit of ssh work you're gonna have to be comfortable in the terminal in order to do that there are some gooey ways of doing it but the the terminal is just phenomenally easy to use in terms of sshing there are again a whole bunch of videos online on how to use ssh in order to get into another computer i highly recommend you search those out it's just really really good to be able to have your server in another room or whatever and use your regular computer to get into it to do work on it like you update it and saw applications whatever if you have to actually go pick up the server hook it up to a monitor hook it up to a keyboard to actually do all that stuff it's kind of a pain in the ass and you probably won't do it as often as you should do so highly recommend ssh being the one of the first things you learn another one that i would recommend you learn is a lot about networking networking is one of those things where you really never learn enough because the more you learn the more you realize it's really freaking complicated and unfortunately i i think everyone's in this kind of situation for the whole time they're doing home labbing is just that you never really know enough about networking to feel 100 sure you're doing it right maybe that's just a feeling that i have like i feel sometimes like yeah i did a pretty good job there oftentimes they're like oh man if somebody said they were gonna attack my network i'd be screwed you know that's the feeling i have most of the time so i highly recommend learning how to create networks how to secure networks all that stuff it sounds overwhelming because it is overwhelming and if you're just gonna if you're just starting out i would recommend not worrying about it too much but just kind of keeping it in the back of your mind that you kind of have to know a little bit about it and the more you learn about it you'll learn more that made a lot of sense but i hope i hope you get it right the more you learn about the more you'll learn that's just the dumbest thing i've ever said okay uh the last one i mentioned in one of the early ones i recommend you learn how to use docker because not only are there a ton of applications that come with a docker compose or docker you know package all ready to go for you but it just makes it so easy to actually get started with a whole bunch of different applications plex jellyfin navidrome whatever it happens to be right they all have docker containers you put those things in on your server start them up and you're ready to go i mean it is complicated in that you have to learn something but it actually is not as complicated as a lot of people make it out to be so i highly recommend docker those three technologies definitely are things that you need to learn as you go along or even before you start going along so the thing about home labbing is that it can be overwhelming for a lot of people and the number one tip i have for you and it's something that i've talked about in other videos where i've talked about starting a home lab is start small if you go out and buy yourself fifty thousand dollars of equipment if say you have unlimited cash just lying around and you have all this stuff and you're not actually technologically you know prepared for all of that stuff it's just going to sit there and get dusty starts most people are much better off starting small with their home lab one application on a very small computer that was really cheap get used to it learn a little bit of network networking so you know what you're kind of doing so you can learn about ports and port forwarding and exposing things to the internet and all that stuff start with that one app and all of the knowledge that you gain from just doing that one app whether it's jellyfin or whatever it will carry forward into anything else that you eventually want to try whether that's home assistant or navidrome or anything like that right a lot of the skills that you'll learn in that first little bit will carry forward as you expand your home lab if you choose to expand it getting yourself in too deep starting with too many services right away starting with too much hardware right away often leads you to not only fatigue but just being purely overwhelmed with everything that goes around goes along with actually running a home lab and it will either lead you to burnout or just kind of pulling your hair out you know like what am i doing here so highly recommend starting small it's just the best way so that's it for this video if you have any thoughts on this kind of stuff you can leave those in the comment section below i'd love to hear from you you can follow me on master honor odyssey those links will be in the video description you can support me on patreon at patreon.com slash the linux cast there you'll find a weekly exclusive podcast that i put out for 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