this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2026
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I'm looking to turn an old laptop into a home server. What distros make sense to use for that? Use a server dedicated distro like Ubuntu Server or is a regular desktop environment like Mint fine too?

Edit: TL;DR use Debian

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[โ€“] MagnificentSteiner@lemmy.zip 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

As a complete beginner who had minimal Linux experience at the time, I put OpenMediaVault (Debian based) on my server. It has been absolutely fantastic, I can't recommend it enough.

[โ€“] Bryan065@kbin.earth 1 points 1 week ago

I highly recommend openmediavault as well. Been using it for all my servers. After you get it installed, just make sure to install the omv-extras plugin so you can use docker/docker-compose from the UI (if you want).

Gives you a nice web GUI and is Debian based so you can dive into the CLI if you want.

Just be aware that you shouldn't modify some files that are managed by Openmediavault (like the fstab) and never install a desktop environment or you'll break openmediavault.