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submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) by steel_for_humans@piefed.social to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world

I use Debian as my daily driver, but I'm still a newbie. I would like to selfhost a few apps, initially on a VPS, but I will probably move to a local PC once I diagnose what is broken with my old computer.

The guides at https://selfhosting.sh/ always recommend Ubuntu Server LTS for newbies, but Ubuntu seems to have bad PR and I already run Debian on my home PC. On one hand, I am a newbie and I guess Ubuntu might be easier to set up and maintain. Though, I don't HOW exactly? On the other hand, if I have Debian on my home PC and on my server, they are the same system, so I'd be learning the same system at two places and with two usage scenarios. But it might be easier to make mistakes on Debian..?

What is your opinion/recommendation?

EDIT: thank you everyone! My gut feeling was Debian and your responses were overwhelmingly in favor of Debian, so Debian it is :)

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[-] ndupont 7 points 2 days ago

Debian and docker. When you'll have your local server, just go with Proxmox, which is based on Debian. On that you'll be free to run any Linux flavour as an LXC container. As you are already familiar with it, that's a no-brainer. The day you decide to play with a raspberry pi, Raspberry-Pi OS is also Debian with very little customisation.

I'm gonna second this. Proxmox bare metal and everything else hosted by it as a VM or LXC.

[-] pixeldaemon@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 days ago

Also maybe Podman. Almost the same as Docker but rootless.

[-] steel_for_humans@piefed.social 2 points 1 day ago

I use Podman on my desktop, but only for that single container (I need Microsoft SQL Server for work). I know they are 99% compatible, including CLI syntax, but in that 1% cases things might break and thus https://selfhosting.sh/ is recommending to stick to Docker for newbies, because almost all tutorials are written for Docker. I don't know, I might try with Podman, however I don't really need a steeper learning curve if whatever setup guide for some service that I'm using is not compatible with Podman.

[-] ndupont 1 points 2 days ago

I should have a look at podman one day

this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2026
69 points (100.0% liked)

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