Best distro to turn my old laptop into a server?

Merulox@lemmy.world to Linux@lemmy.ml – 13 points –

I have an old laptop that I want to turn into a server, but I want it to be as seamless as possible. I don't have any knowledge in web hosting, so I'll use whatever distribution makes it easiest.

Also willing to venture outside of Linux territory to try those NAS-like operating systems. I just want things to work.

I called it old, but the laptop in question actually has decent specs. I want to host a personal searx instance, a forum, nextcloud, and, well, I'd also like to run single-user fediverse instances but I heard that they're very hard to manage and update so I'm still not sure about that.

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I’d throw an option out for Suse but if you really want as little OS as possible Arch Linux.

I actually started of with arch on my server, and recently moved to Debian. In my opinion, Debian is way more suitable for a server, especially if you want things to “just work”. Especially when installing Nextcloud, I noticed how much more Debian does for you compared to arch, which makes the entire process way easier.

Same reason I’m on Suse now as well. I got tired of tinkering all the time.