Self-Hosted Main

proxmox. i fine its very easy to work with and manage. also proxmox backup server is amazing

Debian, FreeBSD. Proxmox is awesome for hosting VMs, LXC, and Docker Containers (via a VM).

Debian. I use mostly docker containers and super easy to spin up and manage.

Debian, I wouldn't pick another one.

Arch. No Window Managers or Desktop Environments. Its easy to work with when no extra fluff is installed.

Debian. All day, everyday.

Debian

Debian Stable. Clean, easy, and reliable. Upgrades smoothly without drama.

Anything that can run docker works for me.

Arch Linux for my primary server. Raspbian for my SBCs.

vSphere 8

good support keeping the compatible packages readily available is one of the feature you might do well with

I really wanted to self host so I wrote my own OS, from scratch.

Unraid for my disks and *arr stack and 3 other Ubuntu LTS boxes for my containers

Proxmox, unraid, pihole ftw

Fedora server + cockpit

solid and simple admin web panel with containers support (via plugin)

Homeserver? Surely you mean home serverS.

Proxmox, unraid. Ubuntu server vms

Ubuntu server LTS

Arch, because I've always had a better experience with it than Ubuntu, be it server or desktop. I also daily drive it on my desktops.

It's so much easier to setup. Only with Docker and MergerFS it's a command and easily updatable, instead of the PPA setups or bash installs you have to do on Ubuntu. The wiki is still the best.

And it's way easier to maintain when there's less stuff.

Proxmox 4 lyf

I went from freenas to unraid and couldn't be happier.

Unraid has a ton of really amazing features, it's super easy to use, the docker support is great (freenas didn't have docker support when I left), the parity drives are magic, and just being able to slap random disks of any size in your NAS is great.

I've had a few issues with freenas, but I've never had a single issue with unraid. That shit just works.

Edit:

I have a live stream porn downloader, that'll watch when people come online and start capturing the stream. I don't want this to be part of my system and putting strain on it, so with unraid I'm able to put disks in my system and use a plugin called unassigned devices, which allows me to add them to the system, but have them be separate from my main array.

That's why I just love unraid. The flexibility is great.

Ubuntu LTS server. I chose it because it's got good support both in community and enterprise support. Also it's pretty simple to use and almost forgot it's got zfs built in.

If you want a beautiful front end for docker containers

CasaOS/ZimaOS Cosmos-server Unbrel

Otherwise

• proxmox
• truenas
• unraid

Denian stable, openSUSE Leap

I was an ESXi fan for over a decade until I found proxmox.

Now I use a combination of VMs and Linux containers.

I use containers for:

Pihole, Ubiquity WiFi Controller, Plex, Audio Bookshelf, imfluxdb, etc. And VMs for Home Assistant and Untangled.

https://ramblingnonsense.substack.com/p/a-journey-from-esxi-to-proxmox-in

If you’re looking for a NAS and don’t want to invest on all disks right now, unraid. Otherwise truenas

Ubuntu server, everything on it runs with docker, nothing beside docker is installed, because of this i use rolling release instead of LTS

I use TrueNAS, mainly because I wanted a solid storage solution. I don't really need many VMs, so I'm happy to run jails for stuff I need.

I also run a small RPi4 server with a few docker containers (a secondary Syncthing server, TVHeadend server, etc).

If I had a need for VMs, I'd run Proxmox (as I have some experience with it).

TrueNAS scale. Why: my main concern is backup and data protection, and TrueNAS offers just that. On top of that it's flexible enough to build a media suite on top of it, and it's easy to manage. I could have also gone unRAID, but since trueNAS is free and offer a bit better protection imo (at the cost of flexibility), I picked that

Proxmox, TrueNAS, Ubuntu server.

I think it really depends on what you intend to do with it... Many answers here will mention what they use but not why.

In my case I want to have various services installed in docker containers, and I have the skills to manage Linux in console. A very simple solution for me was to use a rock-solid, established Linux distro on the host (Debian stable) with Docker sourced from its official apt repo. It's clean, it's simple, it's reliable, it's easy to reinstall if it explodes.

Why containers (as opposed to directly on the host)? I've done both over several years and I've come to consider the container approach cleaner. (I mention this because I've seen people wondering why even bother with containers.) It's a nice sweet spot in-between dumping everything on the host and a fully reproducible environment like nixOS or Ansible. I get the ability to reproduce a service perfectly thanks to docker compose; I get to separate persistent data very cleanly thanks to container:host mapping of dirs and files; I get to do flexible networking solutions because containers can be seen as individual "machines" and I can juggle their interfaces and ports around freely; I get some extra security from the container isolation; it's less complicated than using VMs etc.

NixOS. Only been running it on that server for a couple of weeks now, but so far I'm happy with it.

I like being able to manage almost every aspect of the system from a single declarative configuration file.

I don't do any fancy NAS and/or RAID stuff though. Just the OS living on an nvme, and a logical volume running across two spinning disks. If I need direct file access I use scp, but the storage is more for jellyfin and a syncthing node.

Alma, Talos, OpenBSD

Proxmox 👍👍👍

I used unraid last year, excellent experience learning how to use docker + vm in a user-friendly interface.
Now I use debian (installed via debootstrap) headless (docker only).

I use OpenMediaVault, with a Docker plugin and a few containers for Plex and Transmission. Although, I don't actually remember if OpenMediaVault is the OS itself, or running on top of it, which is a testament to stability, I suppose.

AlmaLinux + portainer. Cockpit-machines for vms.

FreeBSD

Proxmox because it's just Debian with a pretty UI for QEMU

I'm liking it a lot more than ESXi - it's just better honestly

Proxmox on bare metal. Then a TrueNas VM for storage. And a Ubuntu VM for containers.

Ubuntu server with ansible playbook and docker services

windows server, I don't like raid software

Proxmox or Debian minimal!

unraid if you're running media apps, cameras, etc it works well

Proxmox, Debian containers.

Fedora Kinoite + podman

Harvester HCI