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.
don’t expect a 19 year old laptop to perform all the tricks something more ‘modern’ can do, such as transcoding video for a streaming media server. also note that a t5600 is not a ulv chip (draws as much as 34w under load, on its own)–so probably not a candidate to run ‘lid down’ without some outside help for cooling.
it’s not fast, it’s not power efficient, it has slow networking (10/100 and 22-year old ‘g’ wifi), and lacks usb3 for ‘tolerable’ speed on extra external storage space—but it will be ‘ok enough’ for learning on.
if you go with something like yunohost or even dietpi, you will pretty much restrict yourself to what it can run and do and how it does it. if you want more ‘control’ or to install things they don’t offer themselves, you’ll need to ‘roll your own’. a base (console only) debian would be a great place to start. popular, stable, and tons of online resources and tutorials.
I don’t know about yunohost, but dietpi doesn’t feel restrictive. You can use the dietpi software manager, but you can also install whatever else you want next it using apt, docker, etc, adjust systemd, Cron, rsync etc outside of it. They just don’t guarantee they might sometimes break a thing you run outside of what they offer when you run dietpi updates?