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.
I’ll add a vote to all the people suggesting Yunohost. Yunohost is a perfect place to get your feet wet with basically no experience required. I’ve played with it myself and it does a good job of simplifying and holding your hand without oversimplifying or keeping you on a strict, tight leash. It even helps you deal with common newbie issues like dynamic IPs so you can become more reliably available on the internet, something that a lot of other guides just assume you’re going to have a static IP assigned by your ISP or VPS and handwave away the complexity of what you’ll have to do if you have a dynamic IP like most home connections. (Experienced self-hosters gradually discover that having access to a static IP somewhere, anywhere, makes life a lot easier, but don’t worry, you’ll get there too eventually, it’s not important when getting started)
You can get started by working your way through the process here.
I agree but I do have to say that Yunohost is becoming bloated. Successive versions run way slower than they used to - I know it is part of the security and ease of use but it is becoming noticeable. You can also use some docker things in yunohost but for an absolute beginner Yunohost is by far the best way to do it.