Who's Tyguy047?

My name is Tyler, I go by Tyguy047 online. One of my favorite hobbies is coding and you'll learn more about what I do with the project sections on this website. I also like photography so I added a few pages of my work if you want to see that too.

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The ONLY OS that you need for your home lab...

There is only one linux based operating system that you need for your home lab. It has high performance and is extremely easy to install and use...

Arch, Debian and Fedora. For home lab beginners (or oven veterans for that matter) the choice of which linux distro to use for a given project can some times be the hardest part. Theres literally thousands of different options each with their own set of pros and cons. That being said, there truly is one OS that has worked flawlessly for all of my projects while delivering unmatchable performance.

My Experience

I run a vast variety of different home lab servers each one serving its own unique purpose. I have tried countless operating systems on them trying to tailor each server to its use case. The problems I kept running into were the following,

  • I found it annoying to manually SSH in after setup via password and transver my key to the server then disable password auth.
  • I'll often repurpose laptops as servers and I did not like needing to seek out drivers and manualy install each one.
  • Lastly I wanted to be able to have a reliable OS that wouldn't give out on me while not having ancient packages.

        These were challenges that I faces for a while and I would chop them up to being just the "Linux experience". Then I decided to do something that most Linux users would look down upon. Yes thats right I installed Ubuntu. I was never one to hate on Ubuntu or it's users. I think it is a fantastic OS. The reason that I gathered that many don't like it is that it comes pretty pre setup out of the box. But I digress that is an argument for another day.

        I ended up installing their other operating system, Ubuntu Server. Canonical's server operating system is an impressive OS built on top of Debian. I found it to be better that Debian for server use cases for a few reasons:

  • The performance difference was not noticeable at all. I ran the exact same software with the exact same configuration on both pure Debian 12 and Ubuntu server and noticed literally no difference. I put them to the test by running each on a laptop with only 6gb of RAM and an Intel Pentium 2020M clocked at 2.40 GHz.
  • The install process was by far the most straight forward and comprehensive that I have found for any server OS. Want to import an SSH key(s)? Get them directly from your GitHub account with just your username. Sick of spending hours trying to find that driver for the 10 year old wifi card or GPU in your laptop/server? Check the "Look for 3rd party drivers" box on one of the first screens that shows up.

        Now I'm sure it can't be that hard to do all that on good old Debian, however Ubuntu's package repository also includes newer packages that are still tested for stability. Canonical also releases LTS versions more often. If you want newer packages on Debian you would have to use Trixie (AKA Debian 13) which is still in testing or use Debian's Sid repo, which I use as my main OS on my PC. However in a server setting it is significantly slower that Ubuntu server.

         Roughly ~34% of websites powered by Linux run Ubuntu server as of 2024 (Source: truelist.co).

        While Ubuntu as a Desktop OS may be more beginner friendly and users may eventually grow out of it, their server operating system is extremely easy to setup and delivers fantastic performance on all different levels of hardware.

Written By:
Tyler Caselli (Tyguy047)
 July 14th, 2025 (7/14/2025)