Self-hosting your own services is one of the best ways to save money on subscriptions and increase your privacy. Since you’re running the services on your local network, no one else ever sees the data.
But setting up a new Linux installation for each virtual machine or container can be time-consuming and annoying. That is where turnkey Linux distros come in.
What is a Turnkey Linux distro?
Normal Linux distros come prepackaged with a certain set of programs and libraries. For example, Kubuntu comes packaged with Plasma, the desktop environment, and a host of KDE apps. On the other hand, Ubuntu comes packaged with Gnome for the desktop environment and doesn’t come with the KDE apps.
For the most part, the differences between distros come down to which programs and libraries come preinstalled, though there are larger differences between distros based on Fedora, Debian, or Arch.
Turnkey Linux distros take the normal variances between Linux distros and specialize them for a specific job. For example, a turnkey Linux distro for hosting a Minecraft server might come preloaded with the software required to host a server dashboard, which makes managing the server easier, a program to automatically handle file backups to save your worlds, and Java, so that you can actually run the Minecraft executable.
A turnkey Linux distro for running a Jellyfin server might come preloaded with Jellyfin, backup software, and some kind of program to help manage the files in your media library.
5 Reasons I Use Jellyfin Instead of Plex
Jellyfin’s price isn’t the only thing going for it.
Turnkey Linux distros are designed to take a lot of the pain out of hosting your own server on Linux if you’re not precisely sure what you might need for a task, or you don’t want to fiddle with setting them up each and every time.
Turnkey distros are a dream for self-hosting beginners
Self-hosting is more approachable than it used to be, but one of the remaining friction points is fighting dependencies. If you go to install something you might want to self-host, you’ll quickly find that a lot of them require specific system settings with certain libraries installed and configured in advance.
If you’ve gone through that process manually before setting them up, it might not be that daunting, but if you’re just starting out, it can be tedious, frustrating, and sour you on experience entirely. Turnkey distros, because they usually come with specific libraries and programs pre-installed for specific use cases, can take a lot of the frustration out of the process.
Odds are you’ll still need to tweak a turnkey Linux distro slightly for most uses, but it is the difference between remodeling the entirety of the inside of a house and giving a bedroom a quick new coat of paint.
Turnkey Linux distros are fantastic with Proxmox
You can just download Linux distros from the website if you want, and I have done that in the past when I was running a Linux installation “bare metal,” or directly on the hardware of the computer in question. However, I’d recommend that you use Proxmox to host your services instead.
Proxmox lets you quickly (as in less than 30 seconds) create new virtual machines or LXC containers. It also has a built-in repository that includes dozens of different turnkey distros.
The combination of Proxmox with Turnkey distros lets you spin up a server for a specific application in a virtual machine in less than a minute. I use them constantly whenever I want to try some new application or self-hosted service, and often times I just keep using it because the turnkey distro is good enough.
Once you start using turnkey Linux distros, you might ask yourself: how do I make these even better for my uses?
Luckily for you, it does get even better. Once you finish tweaking a turnkey linux distro to your liking, you can use that installation to create a new turnkey distro.
That way, when you decide you want to make another server of the same kind again, or help a friend out with theirs, you don’t have to start from the beginning.