I guess everyone is welcome, from windows to people doing it on OSes they made themselves!
this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2026
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I started out self hosting with windows server 2012 because my school was a Microsoft and Cisco partner but mostly ran Linux VMs on it using hardware raid. Ran bitwarden, Plex and a wiki plus a VM with a bunch of docker containers. Ran that for about 3 years and now have been on Unraid for 6 or so years and loving it.
Sure are. I started self hosting with a VM on Hyper-V.
Oh, I'm sorry. Lol.
Hyper-V is just so bad. Decided to run it for a while as a test, I couldn't get back to ESXi fast enough, haha. And I come from the Enterprise world where Hyper-V is common.
Honestly I find hyper v to be easier to work with then virtual box for home stuff and with what Broadcom has done to VMware I am staying away from it.
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Nice to hear it!
Always. Started on windows hypervisors and windows as they were relevant to my work and I was trying to skill up at the time. Since moved to a Linux stack as the lab grew in scope and my distaste for MS grew as well.
my distaste for MS grew
This is a natural progression. Inescapable.
Verily. Especially after working with heavily windows/MS environments for a decade and change. Intune makes my blood boil.
Linux is favored because the ecosystem is more open but you can also run it on low power devices which isn't really the case with Windows (and getting worse over time) and it's free with Windows, to be legal, you need to license the cores/VM. Now does anyone actually do that?! I wouldn't think so.
Hey! I started running a home server on Windows 10. It was a great easy way to get started. The only problem for me that I found with time was that Windows updates would take everything that I was running offline, which was a nuisance to log back in and open everything up.
You may find you gradually move towards Linux :P
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I self hosted windows for many years, mostly because that is what I used at work. I liked it because it hid some of the low level details and worked most of the time.
The thing that finally made me switch was the exorbitant cost of licenses and the need to run services on older hardware.
DM me if you want some keys. I have a few copies of win10 and winIOT laying around that I'm not going to use.
I’m not a windows hater per se, but I am for using the best tool for the job.
And in my opinion windows is not the best tool for self hosting. There are things windows does work well for that meshes well with self hosting and that’s docker. Honestly I’d focus on that for a lot of reasons but primarily because it’s a very easy to deploy self contained way to provide services. And the differences between docker on windows and Linux is almost negligible.
My homelab is a mishmash of Windows and Linux machines. The primary game server is Windows and the rest others are Linux.
I was at this point for a while, believing gaming on Linux wasn't up to par, until I discovered that Linux has a decent translation layer (Proton/Wine) that means even though the vast majority of Steam games are Windows only, Steam or other launchers like Heroic just run them in a container, and from my experience none of my games have had issues. This has only improved massively over the years.
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They better be! I've got a mix of proxmox running Windows and Linux machines, as well as a bare metal Windows machine for streaming gaming, as wells as Linux laptops to access all this.
... My only shame is using Windows server to host my DHCP server.
I don't see why not.
Many of us started running Windows Server and endpoints, but in my case, the cost and substandard tools turned me away. I was running A DLNA server and using WDS (yes, very overkill for home, but fun to learn for work), but then I found TrueNAS (then called FreeNAS) running on BSD. I now run a simple share from there and Kodi on my (Linux and Android) user endpoints. I don't bother with imaging anymore, and use dd for backups to my NAS. My Firewall runs OPNSense (BSD) and I run OpenWRT on two TrendNet WAPs.
I'll never go back to MS. It's just not a welcoming platform from my perspective. Don't even get me started on .NET or the various and sundry "redistributables" constantly required by every tool you try to use.
Don’t even get me started on .NET or the various and sundry “redistributables” constantly required by every tool you try to use.
It's absurd but Linux is far worse. Instead of addressing library bloat and versioning we have Docker which just throws EVERYTHING into a bag and makes you download an entire OS environment space to run one app.
That's not Linux, though; that's docker.
.net isn't Windows.
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dotnet is pretty great, runs great on Linux, and you can ship your executable without a need for an external framework if you want.
Dotnet is also open source, a strongly typed language, a large standard library so it doesn't have the problems of npm, has great performance and is all around the best language out there imo.
Use rust if you need to be closer to the metal, but that's rare.
Maybe now. .NET wasn't always open, used to be Windows-only, was buggy, version-dependent (but not as bad as the jre could be; true), and had (still has) poor resource-management. I think you're talking about .NETCore.
That said, I wasn't commenting on the code viability (I'm not a professional developer) so much as the support overhead required (back when I worked support) for the different versions of .NET, especially when MS stopped including v3.5 in Windows except by using "features and programs" or downloading and installing it manually.
Yeah, that's pretty dated. There's one flavor of dotnet (more or less) that runs on everything, and it's about as efficient as anything with a garbage collector can be.
There are hairs that could be split in there, such as the release cadence, hosting bundle vs desktop runtime, but that's all much simpler than it used to be. You generally know if you want to run a desktop app vs a webserver.
I self-hosted Plex and Jellyfin on Windows. It's fine. But as others have said, Windows machines tend to be too power-hungry. Honestly I think that's more a symptom of x86-64. Changing the OS from Windows to Linux does not magically change the power needs of the hardware. (However, Linux tends to demand less of the hardware, especially if there's no GUI.)
I now self-host Plex on a Mac mini (M2 Pro, 16GB RAM/512GB SSD). M2 Pro in Intel speak is like i5 as in, it's the "next one up" and "good enough for most people" but not the low entry into the platform (M# base or i3), though I'd say M4/M5 base is better than M2 Pro. Just like going 2-3 generations newer, the i3 gets closer to and may surpass an older i5.
There's a reason self-hosters prefer Linux, but I'd think it would be more about the hardware than the software. Windows is problematic because you're opening ports and Windows is a target due to its massive market share. Mac is kinda (/sorta /not really) UNIX based, and Linux is, well, it's Linux; neither is bulletproof, but both are better than Windows because they're not really being targeted. That said, the MacBook Neo and Mac Mini going for $500 if you're a student, $600 otherwise is getting a lot of people sick of Microslop's BS to switch, and the Neo in particular is forcing the PC market to get competitive as macOS market share is rising — this also makes it more of a target. You're always at some risk online and a little common sense goes a long way.