Never been a better time to try Linux. Ubuntu is pretty easy to get started with (download and setup a bootable USB, stick it and go) and ChatGPT is extremely good about walking you through any questions. You don’t even need to ask highly technical questions, just tell it your goal and your system.

“I just installed Ubuntu 22.04 on my computer and want to SSH into it from a Windows computer on my network, how do I do that?”

“I want to download a file from my Ubuntu command line, how do I do that?”

“I want to setup a share that both Windows and Linux computers can access over my network, how do I do that?”

“I have a github action runner provided by github that includes a run.sh file that needs to run constantly. I want to setup as a background service on my Ubuntu Linux computer so it will always be running as long as the computer is on, how can I do that?”

It will spit out every command line you need in what order, contents of a .service file, tell you how to monitor it, and so on. You can ask it what each line does, what the parameters mean, etc. It’s like having a mid-level sys admin at your fingertips. It will interpret any errors you get, and tell you how to fix them.

Perfect? Maybe not, but its close for a remarkable variety of tasks. It may be, and I’m not joking, 20 times more productive and time efficient than Google searches, reading stackoverflow posts, reading documentations/man pages and trying to decipher what you really need out of any of those sources.

I’m sure some are too paranoid to ask ChatGPT certain things for privacy reasons, and I would anonymize anything you paste in, probably just be a bit mindful of anything involving permissions (you can also ask what security risks exist doing something). Just normal ChatGP3.5 (free) is extremely knowledgeable about Linux CLI and administration along with common packages and apps you’d want to use.

For server:

docker is linux in a jailed namespace (network, filesystem, process tree, etc jail)

Docker hosted on linux is efficient.
Docket hosted on anything else less so.

For me, #1 is license costs. I’ve taken home some servers which would require me to buy 4+ windows server licenses because 16 physical cores is a number for entry-level servers at this point. For the cost of those licenses, I could almost buy a new server with a similar amount of cores every single year.

Second, the brand new filesystem, ReFS, (which needs licenses), has just about caught up to what ZFS had in 2005. The biggest omission is that 2005 ZFS could be your root filesystem. This is less important on *nix systems where your root can be tiny, but windows insists on storing tons of stuff on C, which still needs to be NTFS. ZFS also has 22 years of production testing and still has lots of development.

Third, I want to use containers, and windows uses a Linux VM to do that, so why not skip the middle man?

These are my personal reasons. I stress personal because everyone is different.

• it doesn’t do what I tell it to do, but what Microsoft thinks I should want
• difficult to automate (I’ve been told this has been getting better, but I’m still not convinced)
• if things don’t work as I expect, I can’t look at the source code

In most cases I’m much less frustrated by using non-Windows alternatives in infrastructure. For example when I build Windows binaries, I use wine on linux.

windows is a trash server os for use by people who should know better. pick a flavor of linux, or Open/Net/FreeBSD it’ll do a better job of serving your data.

ok ok, that was a little harsh, some of them do know and choose to take the wrong path.

Because it is poop

Windows uses the NTFS File system and TrueNAS uses the OpenZFS file system which is superior to NTFS for storing your data. I’d do some reading on the OpenZFS file system to check out the benefits over NTFS. Running TrueNAS is really easy, you can check it out on Youtube, (installation and configuration videos). The book FreeBSD Mastery:ZFS (Michael W Lucas, Allan Jude) is also a good read on everything ZFS.

If you really have to I suppose Windows client versions will work as for servers. But Windows server version is much nicer to use.

Windows has more overhead, is more expensive, is less interesting/fun IMO, has poor data parity features, and has less of the homelab community’s attention than any purpose built Linux based home-lab OS. But it will definitely do the job with minimum effort from you.

End User Windows has a shit history with forcing updates on you and reboots just because you waited to long.

End User Windows is also not great at managing large numbers of storage drives.

They also aren’t great to manage remotely.

Sever oriented Linux distros are designed with server workflows and high availability in mind. Desktop Windows isn’t. However, if you’re not running mission critical services, who cares? Do whatever is the most practical to you.

I can get behind your pragmatic analysis. If it works, is low power, easy to manage, etc then that might be a good choice! One thing to possibly also consider: how future proof would you say it is?

I have had two Synology boxes and they were my first foray into servers and backup at home. I’m an amateur, or was, and always will be as far as enterprise things. My recent synology 1019+ acts as an awesome plex server using docker only because it still has intel graphics transcoding. Most recent Synology boxes have moved to AMD or intels that don’t have intel graphics. For that reason and that reason alone, I’d get a small box, my preference is linux, but a small box with igpu. That means you’d still need a proper nas for media. Maybe just slowly update the disks in your old synology, or do a DIY, or learn something. But honestly for my nas purposes, I just trust synology, and I have learned all sorts of other options along the way.

Windows bad. Linux good. BSD better.

For real though. Windows cost money, it uses a lot of resources. And Desktop Version is missing vital parts you might want to use on a windows server like Domain Controller, DHCP, Server, Web Server, Hyper-V. Etc.

Those reasons also have most running Limix or even BSD because they are pretty lightweight especially when used headless. Also as open source they are mostly free of cost. And when you virtualize on a free and open source Hypervisor like XCP-ng or Proxmox you can run way more smaller VMs than Windows VMs as they need more resources.

Lots of great responses here, I won’t reiterate what everyone has already explained. The big benefits imo are redundancy using better file systems like ZFS (Truenas) or BTRFS (Synology, unraid), and in general better management of the drives, and data stored on them. These appliances support more robust raid configs as well, so you have a lot less risk losing data. The other big one is simplicity for what you need it to do. Creating an SMB share on a PC using windows isn’t hard, but it’s not nearly as simple as the 3 clicks it takes on the purpose built OS. These OSs also usually have built in solutions for hosting any other apps you may also want to play with. That’s just my two cents.