Hey selfhosters.
I have a question about starting self hosting; I have run Jellyfin on an old MacBook for a bit and wanna dip more than a toe into the self host pool. Are there any guides out there you’d recommend for actual, complete beginners who knows nothing but wants to learn?
I’ve searched a lot but it feels like they’re pretty advanced for beginners. Is it just a really sharp learning curve to this, or am I not finding the good ones?
For an absolute beginner I would recommend Linux tutorials first so you can navigate the Linux cli.
After that watch some docker tutorials as a significant chunk of self hosting is done with docker or a kube variant but you won’t need to lean about kube yet.
Linux clearly is the way to go, I’ve seen. I’ve been in the Mac environment for the past 20 years so I think the very first thing to do is to install Linux on a VM. Question to that; I’ve seen Debian being mentioned a lot, is this “the best” to start with?
Debian is good to start with as one of its key tenants is stability. Which is what you want in any environment.
A lot of popular distros like Ubuntu and Mint are based on it.
Yeah, okay, that makes a lot of sense. I asked in another comment as well. I read about “headless” servers, which from what I understood means no GUI. Would you recommend that, or use a GUI first and then move to headless when the actual server is in place?
I feel GUIs complicate everything. You need graphics drivers and a display server and a compositor and a window manager etc… it’s a pain and in the end you still have to open a console to type in commands for your actual self hosting. Not worth the effort in my opinion, and it’s better to bite the bullet and get used to the terminal and ssh early.
I recommend using something like tmux or screen, so you still have basic comforts like tabs and multi task. Once you get used to it you can configure it and add themes and plugins if you like. A modern tmux setup really feels like a desktop except everything is faster and it barely consumes any resources.
I started with Mint, then dipped into KDE Neon and Kubuntu, and these days I rock Debian on my server because I want absolutely nothing to fall over if possible. And that’s how it’s been for me. I SSH into it every couple of weeks to run updates, and that’s about it.
Debian is great. Boring, and great.