For servers, Linux is leagues ahead.

“Linux is best” is uttered by those living in their mother’s basement having arm chair arguments online, while fapping to pictures of the girl they had a crush on in 9th grade.

Linux (especially vanilla distros like Ubuntu, Arch, Fedora, etc) in the home lab is for those that hate themselves and like making everything as difficult as possible.

Now that said, while Windows has gotten absurdly better over the years as far as stability goes, it’s still not my personal cup of tea for a home server.

For me, Unraid, hands down and not a second guess. While it is Linux based, you need to know exactly nothing about Linux to run it. Which is the best part, never needing to never learn anything about archaic commands of things that you will never need to know in your day to day life.

TrueNAS deserves an honorable mention, but it’s best left out of the home server space for a large variety of reasons. Excellent for business where you have business budgets.

First; what are you planning to do with it?
Second; how time critical is getting it functioning to you?
Third; I don’t like Ubuntu anything, there are so many other options to pick from that are better, in my opinion. But without knowing what your intentions are, I’ll refrain from recommending any.

Lots of people championing Linux here and probably just as many saying it isn’t worth it so I am still torn 🤣. I think I’m going to spend the next day recovering the lost media and then probably going to give Linux 1 final.shit before totally throwing in the towel… Let’s see how it goes 😅

What’s the goal?

Linux is the most prevalent server (and arguably general) OS on the planet, hands down. If you want to learn more about it, use it for a project, get a job, etc, you can’t do any better.

Ubuntu generally Just Works and has an easy gui installer for both desktop and server. Ubuntu and Ubuntu server are just a few different packages away from each other, plus a few minor differences. If you administer all your machines via ssh, no need for the desktop.

If you want to learn about containerization, virtualization, SR-IOV, HPC, NUMA, etc, Linux is a wonderful platform to push the limits of your hardware (or have as a rock solid server).

Windows is fine, but I think there are far better server choices in the world — specifically Linux or BSD.

I am definitely biased but fuck Windows for server purposes.

I use windows as my server OS just as it’s easy to integrate with my Windows machines, it runs a lot of dedicated servers for various games that most run on windows natively. I run Plex, a file server and I do run VMs and Linux Guests for web servers. The hardware is just an older Dell Poweredge with dual 12 core xeons and 128gb ram. It doesn’t care at all about the loads I put on it.

OP, you should pick whatever you want. It’s obvious from your cocky tone in the posts so far that you’ve got it all figured out.

You can’t articulate an actual use case. Just “I have some hardware, want to do things and stuff.” You don’t know how to install an OS without formatting over top of 700GB of existing data. Don’t know if you want headless or not.

How could anyone recommend an appropriate solution to a problem that isn’t even defined? Why was making a post here with no definition easier than watching one of thousands of tutorials on YouTube for installing a Debian based distro and then trying to figure out bash with to get by?

“I’m going to give Linux one final try…” Linux is giving you one final try. I’m sorry, you didn’t pass the test. Stick with windows homie. Just leave a windows desktop powered on for a long time. Congrats, you have a homelab now.