My “production” home lab is 3 Optiplex 3050 with i7-7700. They work great and are pretty low power.

You got into Self Hosting for unreasonable ideological reasons

I got into self hosting to avoid AWS Fees

We are not the same

This is something I tell people all the time. It’s just as easy to troubleshoot on Linux as it is on Windows the biggest issue is that most people are just kinda innately aware of Windows troubleshooting by virtue of the fact that they’ve been doing it for so long. Linux is probably just as complicated skill wise, but most people just aren’t used to it yet.

And that’s especially true for gamers. If you’ve gone through the dance of tweaking BIOS settings or DDU removing drivers and reinstalling them, then you’re probably gonna do fine on Linux. The only difference is sometimes there won’t be a GUI you have to go hunt down. It will be like 3 commands someone has already written out for you that you copy/paste into the CLI. Which is WAY better in my opinion.

Pop OS

Lots of people were hyping it in 2019/2020 so I thought I’d give it a try as my first real Linux experience. It works great and has a Nvidia driver option when I need that. So I never really tried to switch.

Distro hoping never appealed to me, but I did try Fedora, Manjaro, Mint, Ubuntu, and Debian 12.

I use Kali for work and considered swapping to XFCE DE but pop is fine.

Got any recs? I can generally talk my company into paying for most anything education wise, but Udemy style courses work with my ADHD the best.

Thanks! I’m still on reddit brain.

Yes! Gods damn it. I had that up an everything on my second monitor.