The Best Distro for Your Home Lab - And Other Home Lab Questions

So, I have been home labbing for about two and a half years. And over that time, my home lab has gone through a series of transformations. I started off with a really simple computer and then I went off into a HP workstation and then that was overkill or at least it felt like it at the time. And I moved to three Lenovo Think Centers, which are like these little mini PCs and those weren't powerful enough. So now I'm on an HP Victus, which is just like a regular desktop that I'm using with Nixos on it. The point I'm trying to make is that everyone who starts their home lab usually finds themselves tweaking quite a bit as they go along. And part of the reason why is because a lot of people who do home lab stuff are nerds, right? They they're really interested in the technology. And while they'll proclaim like I did that they're doing it to save money, usually they're doing it because they're interested in the technology that goes behind it and maybe saving money is like an an offshoot benefit. But for those people who haven't got into home labbing yet, I find that they often have a few of the exact same questions. And what I want to do today is talk about some of those questions and try to answer them as we go along. So I have 10 of them listed here. And I think that these are quite common amongst people who are interested in home labbing, maybe aren't as nerdy as those of us who are into it but are considering making the jump. So, let's go ahead and talk about the first one. And the first one is, does it cost a lot? And this is a tricky question to answer simply because it depends. And unfortunately, you're going to hear me say the word depends a lot, but let me explain what I mean. If you know what you want to self-host and you know what it takes to do so, it can be astonishingly cheap to actually start your own home lab. You can, even in this day and age where everything is super expensive, you can hop on eBay or your local auction site or Craigslist or whatever and find fairly reasonable used computers that can self-host quite a bit. Things like Plex or Jellyfin or Home Assistant, whatever it is. If you're only going to self-host a little bit of stuff and you know that going in, getting a computer that suits those needs that is used can be fairly inexpensive. I'm talking about $1 to $200. And after that, most of the software is actually free. You don't have to pay anything for it at all because most of the stuff that you would choose to host or to self-host is open source software. So, you don't actually have to pay for it. However, there's a reason why I said depends earlier. If you are a nerd and you're like me, you'll end up doing these transitions as you kind of figure out what you need to do or what you want to do or you get interested in other things and that can lead to further expenditures. So, if you go on YouTube and you search for people who do homelabbing stuff, you'll see a lot of people who have obviously spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on their home lab. And there's no actual need for that for the vast majority of people, but you can tell that the reason why they've done it that way is because they really enjoy it and obviously they have the means to do so. 99% of the people aren't going to make it that far into the process. But again, it really does depend on what you're going to self-host and how far into it you're going to actually get. The more into it you get, the more expensive it's going to be. So, the next one relates to the idea of saving money. Because one of the reasons why people say they're going to get into home labing, and I know this is from personal experience because it was my reason, is to save money. You want to self-host your music so you can stop paying for Spotify. You want to start selfingo self-hosting your movies and TV shows so you can stop paying for Netflix and and Hulu and whatever, right? So, the question is, will it actually save you money? And then again, you guys are going to hate me, but it depends. It can if you are a budgeter, if you go into it, buy the lowest amount of hardware that you can get, get it really cheap, and you already have your media. If you're self-hosting your media, if that's the reason why you're getting into it, it can be very, very cheap and it can really save you a lot of money because you already have the stuff that you want to self-host. You you get yourself a little bit of cheap hardware. You put those things together with jellyfin or whatever and you serve it to all of your devices. It can be very cheap and that simple. But if you don't have all your media and you have to go out and buy it, that can lead to quite a bit of expenditure and it will take you a long time. You you can you can get Spotify for a lot of months before you make up for the cost of actually having to go out and buy all of the CDs you could possibly want, right? So, there is a little bit of a myth here that self-hosting and home labing will save you money. It doesn't mean that it can't be possible or that it isn't even possible for most people, but it's also something that you kind of have to average out over a period of time. So, I'm at a point now where most of my media is something that I own or I've gotten through certain places, right? And I spend very little money on actually buying new media. That does save me money, but it doesn't take into account the fact that I spent a lot of money getting that media in the first place. Eventually, yes, I will save money over time, but it's going to take quite some time in order for me to get there before those two two things kind of balance out. So, will you save money? You can, but again, it depends. I I know that's going to be a horrible horrible answer for a lot of people, but it's just kind of the way that it is. The next one is one that I was actually really worried about is and it's does your home lab use a lot of electricity? because electricity is very expensive and can lead to horrendous power bills if you overuse electricity. And in my experience, at least so far, the answer to this question is no. It won't take a lot of electricity. Now, again, we're going to have to add a little bit of a a proviso on here simply that if you do decide to go out there and go all out and get yourself a huge server rack with a whole bunch of servers and NAS and all sorts of stuff, your electrical bill is going to go up. Okay? It will. The more hardware you're going to run, the higher your electricity bill is going to be. But for most people who are just getting into this and you're just going to run one server, whether it's a mini PC or HP Victus like I'm doing or a Lenovo Think Center or even an HP workstation like I had earlier. If there's just one computer, chances are your electrical bill is not going to go up that much. For me personally, it was just a couple dollars a month. it wasn't really all that noticeable in terms of the grand scheme of things. And that was at even at a point where I'm also running a JBOD and a whole bunch of other stuff. So, it didn't go up a ton. But again, you have to remember the more hardware you have, the higher electricity bill is going to be. But for most people, it probably won't make that much of a difference. The fourth one is, do you need an actual server? And the answer to this question is weird because it depends on how you define server. What I'm talking about when I ask this question is, do you need one of those things where you slide into a server rack and it's huge, makes a lot of noise. The answer to the question is a blatant no. You don't have to have one of those. Now, you can have one if you're really nerdy and you have a use for it, have at it, right? But for most people, if you're just getting into it, a small form factor mini PC of some kind will get you there. A lot of people use laptops for their home home lab. that works really well because it has a built-in screen and keyboard. So, you don't have to worry about SSH or anything like that in order to get into it if you don't want to. So, you can get by without an actual like real server chassis somewhere sitting in your house. A lot of people do that. A lot of people don't do that. For me personally, I don't have an actual server. I just have, like I said, an HP Victus. It's just a regular desktop computer that uses like a mini ATX board or something like that. So, it's it's still a server. It's just not what you consider when you think of a gigantic server rack. So, a lot of people like, "Well, if I'm going to get into home labing, do I need an actual server?" The answer to that is no, you don't need one. So, the next one is an impossible question to answer, but I'm going to try to answer it anyways. And that is, what is the best Home Lab DRO? The answer to this question is Debian. It absolutely is Debian. It's stable. It doesn't require you to update it very often and you can just use it and kind of forget about it once you have everything set up. If you don't come back to it for five or six months or even a year, it's still going to be just fine. If you put Arch or something like that on it or even open Soua, you're going to, you know, like Tumbleeed, you're going to have some problems because that thing needs to be constantly updated. Now, if you're into that kind of thing, have at it. But for most people, Debian or Debian based a DRO like Iuntu or whatever is perfectly fine. Now, I've come around to Nyx OS being a very good DRO server, but it's definitely not for everybody. So, take that how you will. The sixth one on the list is what are the best apps to self-host? And again, this one is kind of hard to answer because it really depends on what you need. For me personally, I think that most people should start off with media type applications, things like Jellyfin or Plex or Home Assistant if you're trying to get into the internet of things kind of thing, your smart home, whatever it happens to be. My advice on this one isn't necessarily to give you a list of applications that you can go search for and host. You can find those on the internet anywhere. It's to start off small. Have a goal going in and know exactly where you want to start. So, if you are like me wanting to start your self-hosting your own media, you want Jellyfin. I would avoid Plex at this point in time because they're getting more and more expensive and their software is getting more and more crap. So, I highly recommend just starting with Jellyfin. You'll be happy that you did. Is it a perfect piece of software? No. But it's still very good and it's free. They're never going to charge you a subscription fee or a lifetime subscription or whatever it happens to be. So I I that's where if I were to start over again and I would recommend someone else starting in the same place, get yourself Jellyfin, get yourself some media, self-host it there. Maybe you'll find other things to self-host. And what I would say is to always make sure you have a reason for the self-hosting stuff. It can be a bit of a rabbit hole if you go searching for a whole bunch of self-hosting apps that you don't actually need. You'll eventually have a whole bunch of stuff that's just running on your server that you don't use. Always have a purpose with the apps that you choose. The next one on the list is also apprelated and that is do you need to use Docker? The answer to this question is yes. I I I truly believe that the answer to this question is yes, at least at first because Docker is the one of the primary sources for applications in the self-hosting world. It makes installing stuff phenomenally easy. It makes it distro independent. It makes it easy to upgrade things. It makes it easy to access stuff from within the container on your host servers. You don't have to deal with a whole bunch of of permissions and a whole bunch of stuff like that. It just makes it phenomenally easy. Now, it's going to piss a lot of people off because there are alternatives to this like native packages and Podman and Nixos modules if you're on Nixos, right? For me personally, I would never change the fact that I started off learning home labbing through Docker. It's just it makes it so easy. So my answer to this question is yes, but other people will disagree. Just kind of as a side note, where should you learn how to use Docker? Go on YouTube. There are a lot of videos on there on how to use it. It's there's some really good ones out there. So there's that. And kind of in that same vein, the eighth question on this list is where do I find help? The answer to that question again is I'm going to point everyone towards YouTube. There's a couple YouTube channels out there. Technotim is one. Uh Hardware Haven is another one. Raid is another one. We had him on the podcast about six months ago or so. They all do home labbing stuff now. Prefer I prefer hardware haven because he's more down to earth in terms of like what he does. He has just he feels like he's a regular guy in terms of what he's self-hosting. He doesn't he has a server rack now, but it's not like Techno Tim who has all this stuff, right? TechnoTim is much more aspirational, like you're trying to get there. You'll learn a lot of stuff, but you're never going to be him, right? where hardware heaven seems like it's much more attainable. At least I I think so. I'll put links to all their channels in the v video description below. Um YouTube I think is the best place to do this, but there are other places on the internet. If you if you look down in the video description, you'll also see some links to websites that I use that will point you towards applications and some how-tos and stuff like that. So, that'll help out as well. Also, don't discount Discord. Like like I know a lot of people don't like Discord, but if you come on to like my server and you ask for help with your home lab, I'll be around. I usually I can help a lot of people. There's also about 2,000 other people on my server and a lot of them are very helpful. So, and there are other Discord servers if you're not interested in mine. I I would just seek out people because a lot of people are in the same situation as you are in terms of figuring out how to do a home lab and they're often very helpful. So the ninth question on this list is why should I start a home lab? And the answer to this question is different for every single person simply because everyone has their own reasons. Some people do it just because they're nerds and they want to get into it, right? And that's a terrifically valid reason why. Another reason a lot of people do is because they want to save money. This can, as I said earlier, be a kind of a slippery, you know, kind of sticky reason because sometimes you'll find that you just actually don't save any money at all. Uh because you get into it a little bit too far or whatever, right? Uh other people, it's because they simply want to self-host. They want to get away from paying money to actual gigantic corporations and giving them their data, right? It's privacy. It's protection against AI, whatever it happens to be, right? They have a legitimate reason. The thing about home labbing, of course, though, is that you do kind of have to be interested in it before you get into it. Nobody like stumbles into starting a home lab. At least I don't think so. There's always a a reason behind it. Whether it's pure interest or saving money or there's an application that you want to use like Jellyfin or whatever, there's usually a reason. And then as you know, that reason starts small and then it kind of grows into more and all of a sudden you have yourself a server, right? That's more of the way that it usually works. You have a small reason and it grows. Most people aren't just going to jump in because, you know, pure pressure or whatever. Some people will, but not everybody. The last question on the list is what should you learn first and what technologies should you learn? So, there are two things that you should learn if you're going to get into this. I highly recomsh. You're not going to be very happy if you start a home lab without learning how to do a little bit of SSH work. You're going to have to be comfortable in the terminal in order to do that. There there are some gooey ways of doing it, but the the the terminal is just phenomenally easy to use in terms of sshing. There are again a whole bunch of videos online on how to use SSH SSH in order to get into another computer. I highly recommend you search those out. It's just really really good to be able to have your server in another room or whatever and use your regular computer to get into it to do work on it, like update it, install applications, whatever. If you have to actually go pick up the server, hook it up to a monitor, hook it up to a keyboard to actually do all that stuff, it's kind of a pain in the ass and you probably won't do it as often as you should do. So, highly recommend SSH being the one of the first things that you learn. Another one that I would recommend you learn is a lot about networking. Networking is one of those things where you really never learn enough because the more you learn, the more you realize it's really freaking complicated. And unfortunately, I I think everyone's in this kind of situation for the whole time they're doing home labbing is just that you never really know enough about networking to feel 100% sure you're doing it right. Maybe that's just a feeling that I have. Like I feel sometimes like, yeah, I did a pretty good job there. Often times they're like, "Oh man, if somebody decided they were going to attack my network, I'd be screwed." You know, that's the feeling I have most of the time. So, I highly recommend learning how to create networks, how to secure networks, all that stuff. It sounds overwhelming because it is overwhelming. And if you're just going to if you're just starting out, I would recommend not worrying about it too much, but just kind of keeping it in the back of your mind that you kind of have to know a little bit about it. And the more you learn about it, you'll learn more. That may that made a lot of sense, but I I hope I hope you get it right. the more you learn about the more you'll learn. That's just the dumbest thing I've ever said. Okay. Uh the last one I mentioned in one of the early ones I recommend you learn how to use Docker because not only are there a ton of applications that come with a Docker Compose or Docker, you know, package all ready to go for you. But it just makes it so easy to actually get started with a whole bunch of different applications. Plex, uh Jellyfin, Navadrome, whatever it happens to be, right? They all have Docker containers. You put those things in on your server, start them up, and you're ready to go. I mean, it is complicated in that you have to learn something, but it actually is not as complicated as a lot of people make it out to be. So, I highly recommend Docker. Those three technologies definitely are things that you need to learn as you go along or even before you start going along. So, the thing about home labbing is that it can be overwhelming for a lot of people. And the number one tip I have for you, and it's something that I've talked about in other videos where I've talked about starting a home lab, is start small. If you go out and buy yourself $50,000 of equipment, if say you have unlimited cash just lying around and you have all this stuff and you're not actually technologically, you know, prepared for all of that stuff, it's just going to sit there and get dusty. uh start most people are much better off starting small with their home lab one application on a very small computer that was really cheap. Get used to it. Learn a little bit of network networking so you know what you're kind of doing so you can learn about ports and port forwarding and exposing things to the internet and all that stuff. Start with that one app and all of the knowledge that you gain from just doing that one app, whether it's Jellyfin or whatever, it will carry forward into anything else that you eventually want to try, whether that's Home Assistant or Navadrome or anything like that, right? It all a lot of the skills that you'll learn in that first little bit will carry forward as you expand your home lab if you choose to expand it. Getting yourself in too deep, starting with too many services right away, starting with too much hardware right away, often leads you to not only fatigued, but just being purely overwhelmed with everything that goes around goes along with actually running a home lab. And it will either lead you to burnout or just kind of pulling your hair out, you know, like what am I doing here? So, highly recommend starting small. It's just the best way. So, that's it for this video. If you have any thoughts on this kind of stuff, you can leave those in the comment section below. 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