Never been a better time to try Linux. Ubuntu is pretty easy to get started with (download and setup a bootable USB, stick it and go) and ChatGPT is extremely good about walking you through any questions. You don’t even need to ask highly technical questions, just tell it your goal and your system.

“I just installed Ubuntu 22.04 on my computer and want to SSH into it from a Windows computer on my network, how do I do that?”

“I want to download a file from my Ubuntu command line, how do I do that?”

“I want to setup a share that both Windows and Linux computers can access over my network, how do I do that?”

“I have a github action runner provided by github that includes a run.sh file that needs to run constantly. I want to setup as a background service on my Ubuntu Linux computer so it will always be running as long as the computer is on, how can I do that?”

It will spit out every command line you need in what order, contents of a .service file, tell you how to monitor it, and so on. You can ask it what each line does, what the parameters mean, etc. It’s like having a mid-level sys admin at your fingertips. It will interpret any errors you get, and tell you how to fix them.

Perfect? Maybe not, but its close for a remarkable variety of tasks. It may be, and I’m not joking, 20 times more productive and time efficient than Google searches, reading stackoverflow posts, reading documentations/man pages and trying to decipher what you really need out of any of those sources.

I’m sure some are too paranoid to ask ChatGPT certain things for privacy reasons, and I would anonymize anything you paste in, probably just be a bit mindful of anything involving permissions (you can also ask what security risks exist doing something). Just normal ChatGP3.5 (free) is extremely knowledgeable about Linux CLI and administration along with common packages and apps you’d want to use.

For me, #1 is license costs. I’ve taken home some servers which would require me to buy 4+ windows server licenses because 16 physical cores is a number for entry-level servers at this point. For the cost of those licenses, I could almost buy a new server with a similar amount of cores every single year.

Second, the brand new filesystem, ReFS, (which needs licenses), has just about caught up to what ZFS had in 2005. The biggest omission is that 2005 ZFS could be your root filesystem. This is less important on *nix systems where your root can be tiny, but windows insists on storing tons of stuff on C, which still needs to be NTFS. ZFS also has 22 years of production testing and still has lots of development.

Third, I want to use containers, and windows uses a Linux VM to do that, so why not skip the middle man?

For server:

docker is linux in a jailed namespace (network, filesystem, process tree, etc jail)

Docker hosted on linux is efficient.
Docket hosted on anything else less so.

RAM management is terrible and I just ran Windows Updates on my gaming PC last night and it went into a boot loop. Been a while since I’ve heard about a NIX platform running into boot loops on system updates.

You could use windows fine I am sure. It is just the majority of us have other things we like to run and there all developed for Linux or Docker. The other reason people go away from Windows is it uses more RAM and CPU, you are doing so little that it isn’t really that big of an issue for you. If you decide to add anything else or run docker, you will probably see why the majority go with Linux, because you will run into issues.

Forced updates and forced restarts. If you want a server that’s available 24/4 that’s a no no.

That’s what did it for me. I started my selfhosting journey on a Windows 10 machine, I stalled Docker on it and all of my containers. Every time Windows forced an update and auto reset, I had to manually go back in, log in, spin up Docker again and every container (I now know that a lot of this can be automated but it’s a lot easier to manage a Linux server now). Plus the system requirements are significantly less. The Windows OS alone takes up a chunk of your storage and RAM right off the bat.

I do have one Windows server VM because I enjoy the file system, and it doesn’t do forced resets, but most of my infrastructure is made up of Linux VMs on bare metal Proxmox machines.

It’s also artificially restricted as an SMB server. Has been since XP SP2.

This has been a great discussion here… let me add a few things from my perspective of 30-odd years in the IT space;

• I like to use stuff that’s fit for purpose. Windows 10, Windows 11 and such are desktop operating systems that are fit for their purpose and are very good at it. But they’re less optimal for server-type workloads. Microsoft themselves provide a different operating system for that purpose but it has a different cost model that is a lot higher.
• Access to the GUI is necessary to run Windows. NAS devices and such have the ability to run “headless”; that is no keyboard, monitor or mouse. NAS devices also have a “network first” mentality where everything must be accessible on the network even in the event of a system failure. Recovery cannot require a monitor if you can’t plug one in! Windows (even server) requires physical access.
• Server-focused platforms like NAS provide a lot of capabilities that Windows does not because of the nature of their platforms. For example Synology allows growing your storage easily while Windows requires a lot more technical knowledge to accomplish that.
• Going back to fit-for-purpose; NAS devices provide security that isn’t necessarily there with Windows. Windows has a lot of “moving parts”… in addition to the operating system there are a bunch of ancillary libraries, tools and software that may or may not be used when using Windows as a server. All of these additional tools and libraries provide another potential vector for security breaches especially if not individually maintained thus increasing the maintenance requirements of the system. NAS devices give you the basics of what they need to operate and no more… well that’s until you start adding service packages to a Synology. But even then they will all be managed through the stock package manager and thus updated and maintained, and will still only be as much as you need to get the job done.

As far as my most recent experience with desktop Windows that I find irritating, there are a couple of reasons I still wouldn’t use it as a server platform ;

• Microsoft has a tendency to randomly update your settings, overriding your own settings with what they think are better. A good example that hit me recently is that some recent update overrode my power management settings on a PC I have set up as a headless desktop I then connect to using NX. I had it set to never sleep… suddenly it started sleeping. I had to reset it in order to get back to where I wanted it. This is not the first time this has happened, and I’ve had other issues along these lines. 24x7 isn’t possible when your PC goes to sleep…
• Windows lacks a really solid local filesystem. NTFS is OK and is pretty performant but it lacks a lot of the more advanced features of filesystems from NAS vendors or *NIX systems; ZFS and others have checksumming and scrubbing, most NAS vendors allow scheduled data integrity checks and the like… things like that.
• Software RAID in Windows is acceptable, but is not great. It’s hard to understand when things aren’t working properly and thus plan to replace failed hardware.

Hope that helps :)

Nas software is more friendly and just works. Windows doesn’t have a great raid option, but nas do. Windows desktop also has alot of artificial limits and is less stable and will reboot for patches at inconvenient times.

I simplest terms, it’s like use a flat screw driver on a Philips head. It’ll technically work, but there are just plain better options that will work better and easier.

I use windows 10 pro for my nas/media server. I run drivepool and it works great for me. I run a Pentium gold g6400 and it’s more than enough power. It might use a bit more RAM, but I’ll buy another 8gb of RAM before I spend eons trying to learn how to do something in Linux.

tldr: the OS is shit, it’s super expensive, keeping it actually secure is hell, it’s nowhere near as good as ZFS-based solutions

Windows bad. Linux good. BSD better.

For real though. Windows cost money, it uses a lot of resources. And Desktop Version is missing vital parts you might want to use on a windows server like Domain Controller, DHCP, Server, Web Server, Hyper-V. Etc.

Those reasons also have most running Limix or even BSD because they are pretty lightweight especially when used headless. Also as open source they are mostly free of cost. And when you virtualize on a free and open source Hypervisor like XCP-ng or Proxmox you can run way more smaller VMs than Windows VMs as they need more resources.

I can get behind your pragmatic analysis. If it works, is low power, easy to manage, etc then that might be a good choice! One thing to possibly also consider: how future proof would you say it is?

The biggest limitation is connection limits. While 2-3 users won’t matter, once you get past 10 connections you will start to get into issues.

Windows is feature rich and is stable , secure, and just works. Storage Spaces with ReFS, controlled folder access as a short list of valuable features to any Storage solution.