I have been wanting to self-host recently I have an old laptop it’s a Toshiba satellite m100-221 sitting around it only has 4gb of ram, but I don’t know what is a good starting point for an OS for my home lab I discovered yunohost but heard mixed opinions about it when searching I would like lemmy’s opinion on a good OS for a beginner wanting to start a home lab I would prefer a simple solution like yunohost but would like it to be configurable it’s fine if it needs a bit of tinkering.
If you just want LXCs, use Docker or Podman on whatever Linux distro you’re familiar with. If you get extra hardware, it’s not hard to have one be the trunk and reverse proxy to the other nodes (it’s like 5 lines of config in Caddy or HAProxy).
If you end up wanting what Proxmox offers, it’s pretty easy to switch, but I really don’t think most people need it unless they’re going to run server grade hardware (i.e. will run multiple VMs). If you’re just running a few services, it’s overkill.
LXCs are not comparable to Docker, they do different things.
It’s the same underlying technology. Yes they’re different, but they are comparable.
They use some of the same kernel functions but they are not the same. They are not comparable. LXCs are used to host a whole separate system that shares kernel with its host, docker is used to bundle external requirements and configs for a piece of software for ease of downstream setup. Docker is portable, LXCs much less so.