I have been wanting to self-host recently I have an old laptop it’s a Toshiba satellite m100-221 sitting around it only has 4gb of ram, but I don’t know what is a good starting point for an OS for my home lab I discovered yunohost but heard mixed opinions about it when searching I would like lemmy’s opinion on a good OS for a beginner wanting to start a home lab I would prefer a simple solution like yunohost but would like it to be configurable it’s fine if it needs a bit of tinkering.
As you want to do multiple different things, I recommend you install a hypervisor on the laptop, such as Proxmox. It’ll make it easier for you, as a non-programmer, to manage containers and virtual machines.
You will have to deal some high level networking concepts regardless of what level of self-hosting you do, so you should familarize yourself with it. IP addresses, ports, basic firewalling, etc.
I won’t stop you, but I will strongly discourage you from trying to host your own Email. It is a complicated mess of new standards stacked on top of ancient standards and it’s miserable to work with even when it works. If you misconfigure your email server, you’ll get blocked by every major email provider and there’s no way back from that except starting over with a whole new IP and domain.
Thank you very much I will try out proxmox