I use Ubuntu desktop for my server! What can I say? I installed it one night on my desktop to see how it felt and my experiment turned into an entire fucking server because “already here. More convenient.”
I run 3d printer management software on an old Dell server using desktop ubuntu. Works just fine. I made a second user account that hosts a minecraft server, and a third user account that runs a steam account to host a 7 days to die server. I really wanted to get into administering my own home lab, but I’m just too casual and there is not enough time in the day for me to do all of my hobbies. I can remote in and see a GUI, easy day.
A “server” is just a remote computer “serving” you stuff, after all. Although, if you have stuff you would have trouble setting up again from scratch, I’d recommend you look into making at least these parts of your setup repeatable, be it something fancy ala Ansible, or even just a couple of bash scripts to install the correct packages and backing up your configs.
Once you’re in this mindset and take this approach by default, changing machines becomes a lot less daunting in general. A new personal machine takes me about an hour to setup, preparing the USB included.
If it’s stuff you don’t care about losing, ignore everything I just said. But if you do care about it, I’d slowly start by giving from the most to least critical parts. There’s no better time to do it than when things are working well haha!
I wouldn’t take too seriously anyone saying it’s a horrible idea. I mean, I think you could always argue it’s a waste of resources running a GUI for a thing intended to be a server. But headless servers aren’t the end all be all. I’m sure there’s a lot of licensed redhat instances out there running gnome or whatever because reasons.
Personally I wouldn’t do it unless some hard necessity were there because it’s just another thing that could go wrong, another thing to maintain if you’re capturing your config as code, and mostly because I’m not gonna dedicate a keyboard/monitor for that kind of stuff.
I use Ubuntu desktop for my server! What can I say? I installed it one night on my desktop to see how it felt and my experiment turned into an entire fucking server because “already here. More convenient.”
I run 3d printer management software on an old Dell server using desktop ubuntu. Works just fine. I made a second user account that hosts a minecraft server, and a third user account that runs a steam account to host a 7 days to die server. I really wanted to get into administering my own home lab, but I’m just too casual and there is not enough time in the day for me to do all of my hobbies. I can remote in and see a GUI, easy day.
A “server” is just a remote computer “serving” you stuff, after all. Although, if you have stuff you would have trouble setting up again from scratch, I’d recommend you look into making at least these parts of your setup repeatable, be it something fancy ala Ansible, or even just a couple of bash scripts to install the correct packages and backing up your configs.
Once you’re in this mindset and take this approach by default, changing machines becomes a lot less daunting in general. A new personal machine takes me about an hour to setup, preparing the USB included.
If it’s stuff you don’t care about losing, ignore everything I just said. But if you do care about it, I’d slowly start by giving from the most to least critical parts. There’s no better time to do it than when things are working well haha!
I really do need to be better at backing up my configs and especially my media. Storage is cheaper than it used to be, but it certainly isn’t cheap
Saving your comment for later, when people who know far more than either of us tell you why that’s a horrible idea.
I wouldn’t take too seriously anyone saying it’s a horrible idea. I mean, I think you could always argue it’s a waste of resources running a GUI for a thing intended to be a server. But headless servers aren’t the end all be all. I’m sure there’s a lot of licensed redhat instances out there running gnome or whatever because reasons.
Personally I wouldn’t do it unless some hard necessity were there because it’s just another thing that could go wrong, another thing to maintain if you’re capturing your config as code, and mostly because I’m not gonna dedicate a keyboard/monitor for that kind of stuff.
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