Hey :) I’m not giving you any recommendations but want to give you my personal experience !

5 years ago I had absolutely no clue about Linux/CLI/networking/docker… You name it ! And I also wanted to repurposed and old laptop as a server.

The first distro I installed on my server was Debian ! Why? Because I remembered my brother said something along the line: “Every server infrastructure is run by Debian or a Debian derivative”. So this sounded like the perfect thing to install as a server distro :) !

5 years later I’m still running Debian on this old laptop and it’s going strong ! Never did it failed me except if I did something wrong over the CLI !

As you guessed it, you will need some degree of proficiency on the command line specially if you install your distro without a graphical user interface, which I would recommend… Yes, the CLI isn’t easy to beginning with and you will do some mistakes that will need a full reinstall of your system… But before you learn to move, you learn to stay up right on your legs and this involves a lot a failing !!

It’s not mandatory, you can install a lightweight GUI and take your time. There are a lot of application with good UI which will help you out ! However, not once did I regret to take the harder route and learned so many things along the way ! After this amount of time in the CLI, I can say I’m getting quite good In navigating my system, keeping it healthy and alive :p !

Okay, If it’s a matter of time I get it ! We only have 24h a day and most of this time is already spend at work/school, family time, friends, sleep, eat ! If you’re lucky enough to have 2 hours to spare to tinker arround, a UI is a good idea to keep a healthy balance between all your personal activities ! But keep in mind, both are thorny and have their fair share of issues and debug time.

Last words, have fun with your system :)

While I do agree on the general sentiment to not overcomplicate things, homebox seems rather easy to use and intuitive.

Being able to create qr code to put them on boxes and also have them directly accessible through the web interface is neat !

However, there’s one thing that’s quite cumbersome… There isn’t a one button move everything to a new location. Someone already posted a feature request and got some traction :) so cross fingers this going be implemented in the near futur !!

The solution here is to use a wireguard (or similar technology) server and use it on all your devices. People already use VPNs for everything, so adding this layer isn’t that much of a hassle !

Not self-hosted so I doesn’t really answer your question… However, if you’re still a student consider the switch to Zotero.

Things you can self-host though, to make your books available everywhere, is some webdav sever to link your books directly to zotero and access them on every device.

If you’re serious about book reading and study, nothing beats Zotero !

Oh yeah sorry ! For the ease of use part I ment the NAS stuff which already comes bundled with all the necessary software to keep things easy but less customizable !

Yeah if you get IT enterprise hardware for free it’s kinda similar to repurposing, sooo that’s a great deal and lucky you !!!

But I would never put 1$ myself into specific server stuff ! Except if one day I want to contribute to the self-hosted/opensource community and host something like newpipe that needs to be publicly available.Then yeah, proper hardware and software stuff is mandatory !

Sorry if my comment came by rude, that wasn’t my purpose !

Yeah… Never had a specific “server” certified hardware and always repurpose my hold hardware stuff. Never failed me !!

However, there are some functions specific to NAS’ like low power and other stuff people mention but I already forgot.

IMO all this NAS and certified server stuff is good for Enterprise shit and the like… But for homelabbing it’s probably overkill and way to much overpriced for the little gain…

Except maybe for the ease of use and plug and play function? Each one it’s own I guess !

Yeah maybe, I’m not sure anymore ! Maybe both had some mental break down with some strange political and cultural view 🤷‍♂️ Long time I haven’t been in the gaming piracy scene… But if you confirm it was Empress rather than FitGirl I will edit my comment !

Edit: After some search on the web you’re right :) I ment Empress. Edited !

This reads like Empresse’s* mental breakdown xD

I though that the recommended swap partition was to double until 16 GB? So at 32GB of ram use 32GB of swap?

Back in the day, that’s what I did ALOT on Windows. Specially because of piracy and my younger me having no idea what he was doing XD !

Still happens on Linux with EndeavourOS but not for the same reasons ! There are millions times more ways to break stuff on Linux but I always learn Something new during the process.

Story time:

Learned the other day that some config files are loaded in a specific order and depending what display manager is installed. That was kinda eye opening to understand cause my system didn’t load .profile when .bash_profile was present and I didn’t understood why ! Thanks Archwiki !