This is a nice Short Guide/ kind of TL;DR
I’m still wondering do people actually want
Some kind of general guide or not?
I guess we first need to solve the question of, what do we want to reach as a goal here?
Becuase self-hosting is not specifically equal to “how to use your UNIX computer from a poweruser POV”.
The comment above has also a lot of details that might be overkill for someone starting, especially if we don’t agree on what we’re trying to learn.
Hearing about gRPC, telnet etc…is quite different from a “I want to see my photos on my phone” (by having an instance of Ente running on my homelab) kind of approach.
Theory is cool but getting there by practicing beats anything in terms of learning/achieving your goals.
A general self hosting guide is to get the tools that you would want to get started (docker, cockpit etc.) and some general guidance that applies to every self hosting when spinning up say a docker before and after
And we would use nextcloud with tailscale as an example self hosting and from there the guidance is done and it is up to them
If it still feels overwhelming to many people yeah I don’t blame them but basically it’s a “Here’s what you would generally need to get started in self hosting with even a spare pc or laptop”
This is overall a good intro to the whole topic: https://youtu.be/WZC2D38CaVY
Then you can find some more or just start getting your hands dirty. 
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There’s some good information in this thread thus far. I’ll have to look into it all more soon. Thank you all again for sharing your ideas. And hope to see some more if folks have different/new guides at all.
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This is a fun and a funny video btw! Thanks for sharing.
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Still could be worth a PG guide for those unaware but yeah
I found this tool recently. I have yet to play around with it but the OS does appear to be well made though I can’t speak of it from a privacy and security POV:
I’ve been thinking about showing my friend how to self-host over Christmas. I was thinking of using my old Toshiba Satellite laptop which I think has 120GB storage to start with. I installed Linux Mint which I think is the most beginner friendly Linux distro and I’ve installed Portainer to make installing docker containers really easy. Using Jellyfin, Navidrome and Invidious as examples, they have simple instructions on their website on how to install using docker. Maybe TrueNAS is not the best set-up for beginners. If you have an old laptop to spare, you won’t have to worry about messing up. And once you learn successfully, the skills should be transferable to TrueNAS, Synology NAS, Proxmox, etc.
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My idea is like Debian with LXDE OR headless
With cockpit as the management software kinda similar to how you would get a WebUI in TrueNAS or fedora server (if you use headless)
And docker to make self hosting services as simple as navigating around a docker compose and running the docker compose command or running a command (generally the advice is there’s already documentation telling you how to run it) with some asterisk but you get the general idea, and docker manager cockpit plugin to manage dockers you’ve already deployed.
I use Umbrel for self-hosting my own Bitcoin and Monero node. It’s good for that, but for self-hosting anything else, I hate using their native file manager. Although they’ve added more apps such as Samba which should allow you to use your host OS file manager. They also have File Browser, but I have not tried either since I mainly self-host on my Synology NAS.
And it’s great for beginners since it’s as simple as downloading an app, although a few that I’ve tried did not work ootb. From my experience, making the wrong configurations has bricked my device. And I used to be able to contact support, but they seem to have delegated their support to an AI model. And you also have to verify your phone number on their Discord server because too many users were impersonating as their support team.
If you have a Raspberry Pi, it’s worth trying since it simplifies self-hosting. As for privacy/security, they don’t support HTTPS, but you can connect via Tor. And it’s not open-source, only source available. So not the best option for privacy/security, or even self-hosting compared to TrueNAS or Proxmox.
Thank you for sharing your views. Good to know of some context.
I thought about headless, but SSH might be complicated for my friend. And I don’t even use SSH much myself since I use Tailscale. At home, I use SMB to connect to my NAS so I’m going to try the same set-up for the laptop.
With Cockpit management UI, it doesn’t require knowing SSH
Login to an administrator user (Sudo) [or non-sudo users just won’t have the administrator privileges] and in cases where they need the terminal it’s under the terminal section
Okay, I haven’t heard of Cockpit so I’ll look into it. Thanks!
mhm
I wouldn’t invest time into some wrapper because you will not have all the granularity and learn the specifics of Umbrel rather than get transferable and long-term skills.
The time you’ll gain early on will be lost long-term once you face a wall.
Stick to standards and well-known battle-tested tools without taking any shortcuts. 
Damn, doesn’t even work out of the box… 
Rough for a paid product.
Issue will also be to try to troubleshoot something without having something too niche.
“How to fix umask permissions” is easier to find a solution to rather than “admin user permissions issues Umbrel” in terms of quantity of answers.
Also easier to ask someone how to deploy a regular Docker container rather than something super specific about a tool they never heard about (Umbrel).
Indeed, not worth investing anytime in IMO.
Never heard about this one[1].
I do know about Rustdesk but haven’t used it myself. I guess it’s cool if you want to help out a friend remotely yes. Also no TeamViewer nonsense. 
it is only for Linux distros and written in JS tho ↩︎
Cockpit is not a remote software like RustDesk and TeamViewer
It is designed to be a management web ui (yes the same ones you would see in TrueNAS or Proxmox or equivalent) you don’t need to give others access and can stay in premise
Like an IP KVM then? 
Nope it is just like TrueNAS or equivalent Web UI for linux.
Fedora server in fact comes with it out of the box:
So no it is just any Server management web UI
Yes you can manage VMs/KVMs
or docker or kubernetes if you install the plugins that is
That is about it, nothing too special