For servers, Linux is leagues ahead.

For servers it’s linux for active directory it’s windows

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.

I am definitely biased but fuck Windows for server purposes.

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.

“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.

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.

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 😅

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.

Go with what you know, you can play with more later.

As someone who it utterly sick of windows and recently had to suffer through the install procedure (override boot, select correct drive with different ordering, wait, date and time, no online account, yes I’m sure, YEs I’m Certain, beft friend Washington, mother’s maiden name Washington, pets name Washington, mute Cortana, wait for the ted dialogue to finish anyway, no Cortana, no telemetry 1, no telemetry 2, no telemetry 3, no telemetry 4, some telemetry {best choice before in os settings available on enterprise only}, wait for full screen notification to promise great things, remove bloat from start bar like news search etc, mdl scripts to restore basic functionality if using enterprise, install Firefox, install GPU drivers, actually go to a website to download and install software…) …* catches breath *…through the install procedure, If you are already familiar with windows and your desired server software is available for it, then you are probably better off sticking with it and getting it running. You may or may not be better off with Linux down the line but you can use another computer or virtual machine to test if it is worth learning. I highly recommend just debian for a server over ubuntu and if you need a desktop interface lmde. There may be “better” options but I don’t think they justify the learning curve if you haven’t been on Linux since the days of Intel selling slot loading CPUs.

Also when installing any operating system I recommend pulling the power from any important hard drives first. Windows in particular is very vague about which drive is which during installation, but when not used to it the Linux partition editors are quite different and potentially overwhelming

I guess I’m the 12th man, I run window server 2019 on bare metal. I use Hyper-V for all my services, apps, file share, backup, etc. When I need Linux, it’s in a VM. Never had an issue.

Since you’re familiar with Windows I’d suggest staying with Windows and learning Linux inside of virtual machines. They’re easy to use and get started with, plus if you break something you can be up and running again in a matter of minutes. You should have access to Hyper-V, if not look at Virtual Box or alternatives.