I SHOULD be able to start a new home server today. Its specs are okay, and since my experience with a server distro without any desktop enviroment was less than stellar, I’m trying something different.
And yes, I know it’s best not to run everything on the same machine, but I do plan to host a game or two (not at the same time), piHole, Samba sharing, and Plex or some alternative. MAYBE casaOS on top of it to make things easier, maybe not.
To keep the desktop using the minimum possible resource usage, I was planning on choosing XFCE during installation - is there a better option since I’m not going to use it all the time, just want it to be there when I need to?
(I’ll post photos of the build if anyone wants to see - it looks like it came out of some warehouse or dumpster )
From my own experience, I’d use something less like a desktop and more like a server OS.
I would recommend alpine, debian, or maybe (if you must), pure arch.
I ran a arch-based server for my home server for a while, thinking, well if I run a desktop and a server, shared experiences,etc. It didn’t work out that well for me (yes it worked, but there were pain periods when for instance ZFS modules were unusable on the kernel, etc). And this was even after removing all the desktop stuff (or tried to) that my headless server was going to need.
My archlinux server has been running beautifully without any problems for the past 13 years (it is a complex setup with btrfs, mergerfs for a massive storage pool, and many server services including everything you would need on a home server, several from the AUR).
It is still the same original install from 13 years ago:
I first installed it in on real hardware.
2 years later I moved it into a vmware esxi virtual machine on different hardware, and had it running there for 6 years.
After that I moved it out of the esxi to different real hardware again.
After this, I edited the pacman.conf to have it run on the cachyos repos (updated everything to the cachyos optimized packages) and the linux-cachyos-server kernel
→ this same orginial arch install has now been runing on the cachyos packages for the past 2 years without any problems. => installed arch 13 years ago and been running beautifully on the latest software updated all the time without any problems.
ON THE OTHER HAND:
I had servers on Fedora-server and Ubuntu-server with a lot of problems: essentially every time there was a major point version system upgrade I ran into a package dependency HELL, requiring hours upon hours of manual intervention to fix → arch is so much better.
Yes, this is what I also use on the server.
That’s why the lightweight XFCE to administer it with a gui is a good idea, in the case you want a gui.
Cachyos doesn’t have this problem as it precisely ships a kernel with ZFS built in for this reason. (They do the same with nvida for the desktops) → cachyos has fixed these problematic situations, archlinux has not.
Yes, I am aware of this about Cachy and ZFS, but it wasn’t Cachy I was running…and that was an example
I still would content a less rapidly updating environment would be preferable for a server, though like I said, you can do it.
Ah, I don’t see the frequent updates as a REAL issue, specially since after it’s up and running,I’d probably not update it as much - it’s just running a few services, and games, they’re not even that new. Unless there’s a drastic update in one of them, I should be fine. (also, running away from the update cycle of ubuntu/debian based stuff feels like a good idea since I’d preferably have to redo everything every two to four years if I stayed on them)
Thank you for sharing your experiences and insights!
Alright, adding stuff here so I don’t need to make a new post.
I’m trying to add CasaOS now - I’m used to it, and just want a few tools from it - but it’s asking for an AUR package that’s been abandoned for about a year now, and it isn’t compiling when I try to use PARU to install it.
I’ll take other suggestions on how to get around this too, like alternatives to CasaOS. I need to use docker to run piHole since it’s not directly compatible with arch stuff it seems, and also want Plex and to enable the storage hdd with Samba to the network. Afaik I just need these three for server stuff, the rest I’m probably finding out myself how to do.
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