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Your favourite piece of selfhosting - Part 1 - Operating System (sopuli.xyz)
submitted 6 days ago by theorangeninja@sopuli.xyz to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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Hello everyone,

I am about to renovate my selfhosting setup (software wise). And then thought about how I could help my favourite lemmy community become more active. Since I am still learning many things and am far away from being a sysadmin I don't (just) want tell my point of view but thought about a series of posts:

Your favourite piece of selfhosting

I thought about asking everyone of you for your favourite piece of software for a specific use case. But we have to start at the bottom:

Operating systems and/or type 1 hypervisors

You don't have to be an expert or a professional. You don't even have to be using it. Tell us about your thoughts about one piece of software. Why would you want to try it out? Did you try it out already? What worked great? What didn't? Where are you stuck right now? What are your next steps? Why do you think it is the best tool for this job? Is it aimed at beginners or veterans?

I am eager to hear about your thoughts and stories in the comments!

And please also give me feedback to this idea in general.

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[-] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 4 points 6 days ago

openSUSE MicroOS

I've only tried it out on a VPS, so I'm not completely sold on it yet, but I do think I'll be switching to it eventually. I'm currently on Leap, but since almost everything is containerized, I'm not getting much benefit from the slow release cycle.

For your questions:

Why would you want to try it out? Did you try it out already? What worked great? What didn’t

The main appeal is unattended, atomic updates using bleeding edge packages. You keep your apps as separate from the base system as possible (containerized), and the base handles itself.

My main issue is with the toolbox utility, which runs a container to hold userland utilities for debugging stuff. So far, it has been buggy with the underprivileged user I configured, and I'd really rather not login as root. I've worked around it for now, but it leaves a lot to be desired.

Where are you stuck right now? What are your next steps?

Mostly figuring out how I want to handle my VPN (for exposing LAN services to the outside world) config. My options are:

  • containerize, and configure iptables rules to route traffic properly
  • install the needed tools to the base system and configure it on the host

The main sticking point is that I need HAProxy in front and route traffic to the given device, so the VPN and HAProxy need to talk. The easiest solution is to put both on the host, but that breaks the whole point of MicroOS. The ideal is to have both the VPN and HAProxy containerized, but I ran into some issues with podman.

Why do you think it is the best tool for this job? Is it aimed at beginners or veterans?

This is definitely a veteran system right now, but I think it's ideal because it means I can completely automate system updates and not worry about my apps breaking. It also means I can automate setting up a new server (say, if I move to a different VPS) or even new OS since I only need to deploy my containers and don't need anything special from the OS setup.

I'm also playing with Aeon on my laptop, but that'd going a lot less smoothly than MicroOS on the server.

this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2025
123 points (100.0% liked)

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