Selfhosted

Debian for all things.

Debian

Unraid

NixOS

Proxmox (debian) on the hosts, and Debian for all the VMs and Containers.

Just nice and easy to use, supported by basically everything, and a minimal install uses like 30MB of RAM.

I also have an OSX VM because that's literally the only way you can test a website in Safari (fu Apple).

Debian.

Debian

Three HP ProLiant servers running ProxMox cluster. Each box has a VM for Portaiber, as well as mismatch of VMs running Home Assistant OS, OpenWRT, Ubuntu, Windows and Debian, along with a Windows file server that connectes to four cheap NAS running Ubuntu LTS with a combined 20 mismatched hard drives by iSCSI and borgs them together with Storage Spaces.

It's a fucking mess, if I'm honest.

Debian.

Stable, well documented, easy to install. I do not need anything else right now.

TempleOS

Debian. It is rock solid. If software doesn't support Debian, chances are it supports something Debian based. You never have to worry about an update breaking your computer. It is the perfect "it just works" distro for a server.

Debian

Synology DiskStation Manager.

Arch Linux. I am so used to it I just can't live with any other OS

Ubuntu LTS, with all my services in Docker containers.

I know Ubuntu gets a lot of (deserved) hate for some of the shit Canonical pulls, but for now, I like Ubuntu and it works for me.

When I rebuilt my server at the beginning of the month, I was gonna jump to Debian, but my god the Debian website is obtuse. After looking at the site and trying to determine what to download to get Debian with non-free (I’m unfortunately working with an NVIDIA card), I decided to go with Ubuntu. I needed a smooth rebuild process and with Ubuntu I know exactly what I’ll get when I download the LTS server.

Edit: grammar

Proxmox for the the hosts, Debian cloud imagen for the VMs and docker inside

Ubuntu Server with docker/docker-compose on top.

So many guides for Ubuntu specifically makes reading up on something a lot easier and it works just fine.

Arch because why not.

NixOS

OpenMediaVault

Good OOTB customizations, works on Pi, and easy to extend with plugins (Docker/Portainer is pretty much all I needed).

NixOS, I find the config very easy and quick

Truenas

Thought it would be more popular. I'm outnumbered hard

Ubuntu 22.04 server. It works well enough for my purposes and until it doesn't I don't see a reason to switch distros.

Currently I am using Arch Linux. I am in the process of switching to NixOS.

Just to be controversial, macos. It's nothing fancy, just the arrs and Jellyfin running on an old MacBook air.

Unraid, mostly due to the flexible arrays.

Proxmox with Debian LXC containers. The most natural transition from Raspberry Pi OS which is a Debian flavor

My DIY NAS runs Arch

• LTS kernel
• BTRFS snapshots on root fs
• 4 drive NVMe array using ZFS raidz1
• podman for my docker containers

It's been working fantastically so far.

OpenBSD for all of them.

I'm running FreeBSD I actually like it a lot.

I picked it for zfs. A lot of the ways things work seem cleaner and simpler than on Linux and zfs is awesome with the copy on write snapshots and filesystem compression and all that. I like rc.conf and pf is way nicer than iptables and even when you upgrade it automatically makes a snapshot so you can rollback.

Sometimes I do need to patch and compile things because people seem to not know freebsd exists but that's really the only downside.

TrueNAS formerly known as FreeNAS

Windows 7

Pi OS. It's a Pi4 after all.

Hyper-V / ESXi for host. Mostly windows with some Ubuntu server.

Depends on what you want to do with it. But for most things Debian or Fedora (Server edition) work fine.

Ubuntu LTS, but in the process of replacing it with Debian

Debian Bookworm

I too proxy my moxies, but run various OSes within them (via VMs or containers).

I went for a much simpler approach lately as I downscaled my hardware for efficiency.

I run NixOS on the bare metal. It gives the system management a declarative approach, just like kubernetes would. On top of that, I run libvirt as a hypervisor. In other scenarios I'd use tinyvmm and cloud-hypervisor, but I found qemu way better for the variety of homelab workloads and libvirt is pretty straightforward.

Some vms have pci passthrough, e.g. my routeros vm gets a bunch of NICs directly, some have various funny network topology. Libvirt used to be a pain in that regard, but it's actually fine with NixOS because you manage both sides of the networking stack in declarative configuration.

I run NixOS on the vms too (now for the sake of easy upgrades), and I have a bit of a split between running services natively (systemd is very good about “containerizing” things nowadays) and using docker (mostly because of laziness, e.g. Elastiflow was easier to deploy this way). Finally, I have a single dokerized Ubuntu that's more like a VM (as in, I never had a dockerfile for it, it's fully stateful) running the matter home automaton bits because I gave up on properly containing the matter python stack and went for an easy way out.

Now, a word about alternatives.

I used to run Ubuntu. No more. Upgrading the OS is always a huge pain even if everything is in docker. I want my OS to be managed in a config file and be able to easily roll back to the previous state. I used to run k3s, but even though it is much thinner than k8s, it is still very much ram hungry and I just don’t want to pay for that. Besides, complex networking is often non-trivial due to how its networking works, and multus is a world of pain. I used to run different hypervisors for the VMs (kubevirt, tinyvmm, a bunch others). I went way back to libvirt mostly because it’s straightforward in tuning very specific qemu bits I cared for in the homelab. I have some cpu overprovisioning, so I want to make my quotas set up extremely precisely, sacrificing the right workloads.