Selfhosted

Without knowing what you actually want to do, I'd put Debian on it. Very good, very stable, very widespread OS with plenty of tutorials around for whatever you decide to do with it. Do a minimal installation and 4 GB RAM are plenty to play around with.

XKCD 2501 applies in this thread.

OP, get CasaOS or Yunohost. Very very simple. Your laptop is fine (you'll probably want to upgrade the ram soon).

Step 1: be psychologically prepared to break it all. Don't depend on your services, at first, and don't host stuff for others, for the same reason.

Yunohost? Good for trying out stuff, I suppose. I haven't tried it myself. You could also try Debian, Alpine, or any other. They're approximately equivalent. Any differences between distros will be minuscule compared to differences between software packages (Debian is much more similar to Alpine than Nextcloud to Syncthing).

4GB of RAM? Don't set up a graphical interface. You don't need a desktop environment to run a server. Connect to it via SSh from your regular PC or phone. Set up pubkey auth and then disable password auth.

I recommend setting up SSH login first, then a webserver serving up HTTP, only, accessible via IP address.

Next comes DNS - get a name at https://freedns.afraid.org/

Then add HTTPS, get the certs from LetsEncrypt.

Finally, Nextcloud. It runs kind of "inside" your webserver. Now you can back up your phone, and share photos with family, etc.

Nobody is saying it, so I will. The most important thing is to just get started!

It doesn't matter if you go for a plain Debian server or a fancy proxmox installation with high availability. I believe the most important thing is just to start and experiment. And enjoy!

1. Figure out what you want to host.
2. Read up on what is required to host that.
3. Understand what is required to host that.
4. Skip step 3, wing it and search the internet as you go.

Take a few steps back and ask yourself what needs you're trying to fill. I never heard of Yunohost before, but it sounds high-level and abstract. Are you a programmer? Are you familiar with Linux? Are you comfortable in a terminal? Are you familiar with networking?

Find out what you want to do before installing "everything and the kitchen sink" solutions.

I'll add a vote to all the people suggesting Yunohost. Yunohost is a perfect place to get your feet wet with basically no experience required. I've played with it myself and it does a good job of simplifying and holding your hand without oversimplifying or keeping you on a strict, tight leash. It even helps you deal with common newbie issues like dynamic IPs so you can become more reliably available on the internet, something that a lot of other guides just assume you're going to have a static IP assigned by your ISP or VPS and handwave away the complexity of what you'll have to do if you have a dynamic IP like most home connections. (Experienced self-hosters gradually discover that having access to a static IP somewhere, anywhere, makes life a lot easier, but don't worry, you'll get there too eventually, it's not important when getting started)

You can get started by working your way through the process here.

don't expect a 19 year old laptop to perform all the tricks something more 'modern' can do, such as transcoding video for a streaming media server. also note that a t5600 is not a ulv chip (draws as much as 34w under load, on its own)--so probably not a candidate to run 'lid down' without some outside help for cooling.

it's not fast, it's not power efficient, it has slow networking (10/100 and 22-year old 'g' wifi), and lacks usb3 for 'tolerable' speed on extra external storage space---but it will be 'ok enough' for learning on.

if you go with something like yunohost or even dietpi, you will pretty much restrict yourself to what it can run and do and how it does it. if you want more 'control' or to install things they don't offer themselves, you'll need to 'roll your own'. a base (console only) debian would be a great place to start. popular, stable, and tons of online resources and tutorials.

Start with docker. Any OS will do. Most Linux distros are better but I run docker on Mac, Linux, Windows (not a lot in windows since I despise Microsoft but it does work).

The great thing about docker is it is very portable, modular, and easy to get back to a known state. Say you screw something up, just revert and start over. It’s also very easy to understand in my opinion. It’s like all the benefits of virtualization with much less over head.

Install Debian as a server with no GUI, install docker on it and start playing around.

You can use Komodo or Portainer if you want a webUI to manage containers easily.

If you put any important data on it, set up backups first, follow the 3-2-1 rule by having at least 2 backups in place.

The problem with stuff like yunohost is when it breaks you have no idea how to fix it, because it hides everything in the background.

Hosting isn't OS specific, and in my experience its more about docker. But as far OS goes, I'd say Debian or Ubuntu with the intent of moving onto something like Proxmox

So, it might not sound like much, but 4gb of ram is plenty enough to do quite a bit with self hosting.

If you want to self host, and use it as an opportunity to learn, I recommend you install Debian, and get your hands dirty. If just want to self host without much of a headache, yunohost seems cool, but I've never used it, so I can't recommend it.

I might recommend starting with a project.

Something like getting pi-hole running. This would help you learn some of the networking basics. But I'd recommend reading at least enough to have a conceptual foundation about the things you don't understand along the way (DNS, DHCP, etc).

You'll want one of their supported OS choices to keep things simple. That means one of: fedora, debian, ubuntu, or centos. I might steer you away from centos just because its user base is a bit more linux-pro so finding specific help might be more daunting, but I don't have much experience with it either. Maybe use a "server" variant to keep your system demand to a minimum (boot to terminal only).

Step 1: Install proxmox

Step 2: run the post install script here, disable anything enterprise, test or related to high availability.

Step 3: check out the other scripts on the link. I suggest starting with a pi hole and experimenting from there.

https://community-scripts.github.io/ProxmoxVE/

I have a Dell Inspiron 1545, that has similar specs to yours running Debian with Docker and around 15 services in containers, so my recommendation would be to run Debian server (with no DE), install docker, and start from there.

I would not recommend proxmox or virtual machines to a newbie, and would instead recommend running stuff on a bare metal installation of Debian.

There are a bunch of alternatives to manage and ease the management of apps you could choose from like, yunohost, casaOS, Yacht, Cosmos Cloud, Infinite OS, cockpit, etc. that you can check out and use on top of Debian if you prefer, but I would still recommend spending time on learning how to do stuff yourself directly with Docker (using docker compose files), and you can use something like Portainer or Dockge to help you manage your containers.

My last recommendation would be that when you are testing and trying stuff, don't put your only copy of important data on the server, in case something break you will lose it. Invest time on learning how to properly backup/sync/restore your data so you have a safety net in case that something happens, you have a way to recover.

I've been using YUNOhost for the last 3 years and it's been great. I had no prior experience and would have had no chance of self-hosting without it.

RAM is a bit limiting, but OpenMediaVault is a NAS OS with a serviceable docker interface.