Before we start diving into details of the homelab, it'll be helpful to establish some fundamentals, including basic information about some commonly used operating systems in a homelab. You won't see all of them in my lab- but they've all played a part at some point.

Windows

Whether you love it or hate it, we've all used Windows. While Linux is the gold standard for servers in general, windows offers a huge advantage for those who don't come from a tech background- you can put off learning the ins and outs of a new operating system for quite some time by starting your lab with a windows computer.

For homelabbing purposes in 2026, there are 3 different 'flavors' of Windowsthat we are concerned with:

• Windows 11 Home Edition

• Windows 11 Pro Edition

• Windows Server

Home Edition is probably what you've used before. For most purposes this is fine, and Microsoft will sell you an upgrade to Pro Edition for an amount equivalent to the difference in price between versions, so this is almost always the place to start. However, there are a couple of key features that may mean you'll want to upgrade to Pro Edition down the line:

• Hyper-V Virtualization
  We'll be covering this topic in greater depth in a future post, but suffice to say, virtualization is crucial to getting the most use possible out of your hardware if you begin to add many services to your lab. However, you can run many homelab services like any other app you'd install on your PC- not to mention there are other solutions, like VirtualBox, that would allow you to run virtual machines on Home Edition. Hyper-V offers some advantages, but it's not necessary.

• Support for More Hardware Resources
  With newer motherboards supporting close to or greater than 200GB of RAM- or if you have access to a dual-socket motherboard and multiple CPUs- it's possible that you could exceed the 1 CPU + 128GB of RAM limit in Home Edition. For most of us, however, this is not going to be the deciding factor in how we set up a homelab.

• Domain Joining
  For many homelabbers, signing into all of our services with a single login is the ideal setup. While this is difficult, it is achievable, but you'll need a Pro Edition license if you want to include your Windows computer in that system.

The final edition that bears mention is Windows Server. There are two major differences between Pro Edition and Windows Server:

• Connection Limitations
  A Pro Edition device is limited to 20 network connections between all devices. This means if you wanted to have a shared folder, a hosted website, and a game server running, you're limited to 20 concurrent connections total among the 3 services. If you are only sharing services with your household, this is usually not an issue, but if you're enthusiastically sharing access to your services with all of your friends, you can easily rub up against this constraint.

• Cluster Management
  This feature- the ability to manage running services on multiple devices from a single, natively supported control panel on any one of them, is entirely absent in the non-Server versions of Windows. However, unless you have 3 or more computers dedicated to homelab use, you almost certainly do not need this feature.

Most homelabbers will use Home Edition or Pro Edition, if they are using Windows at all outside of a primary work/game station. Personally, I use Pro Edition on my desktop, and have used Pro Edition in the lab at times- we'll go over that use case in a future post- but I find our next contender to be more suited to my purposes.

Linux

Since it's creation in 1991, Linux has been a contentious topic among tech enthusiasts, but in its various forms it has come to dominate the server and mobile phone space, and you'll likely want to try one or more Linux distributions at some point. While Linux's distributions ("distros") might sound like the different editions of Windows, the differences between distros lie in their primary purpose and which tools are there out of the box, rather than how advanced their features are.

• Ubuntu
  Ubuntu might be thought of as the Windows of Linux. Like Windows, it has both desktop and server versions (though, unlike Windows, these are both completely free and offer nearly identical features), tailor made guides for every task you can think of online, and the ability to host all of the services you want to run in your homelab. While versatile, it doesn't come with a suite of built in tools for any particular purpose. If you start to add many services or physical machines to your lab, you might find that other distros are more useful.

• Proxmox
  Built from most of the same underlying components as Ubuntu (those components being a distro called Debian), Proxmox is a specialized OS known as a Type-1 Hypervisor. This means it is designed to run virtual machines (I promise, we'll get there) with maximum performance. If you need to simulate more physical machines than you actually have in your lab- such as if you wanted some services to have a machine dedicated to them exclusively- then a hypervisor like Proxmox is a very useful tool.

• TrueNas Scale
  Much like Proxmox, TruNas Scale is a specialized Debian-based distro that hyper focuses on one role in your homelab. Where Proxmox manages virtual machines, TruNas manages storage. If your homelab grows beyond one physical machine, and/or you want to store lots of data and access it from multiple devices, it can become a real chore to manage. TrueNas allows you to centralize your storage in a single machine, managing backups and redundancy and sharing that storage with your other devices using its built in tools and web interface.

• OpnSense
  Based on a distant member of the Linux family tree, FreeBSD, OpnSense is a networking focused operating system. While most homelabs only need a simple network switch and router for connecting your devices to each other and the internet, some advanced networking tricks- such as managing traffic flowing around and in and out of virtual machines- are much easier with a machine- physical or virtual- running a specialized operating system like OpnSense.

• UCS
  Univention Corporate Server ("UCS") is another Debian distro, more specialized than Ubuntu but offering a wider feature set than Proxmox or TrueNas. UCS is designed to provide all of the basic services a business or other organization would need to operate, acting as an Active Directory/LDAP server, providing DHCP and DNS services, and hosting a variety of office management and productivity apps. Many of these services can be provided by other distros on the list, but UCS is unique in making all of them easily accessible in one place.

All of these distros can be used in your lab for free, and most of them have at least a few alternative options that are also free. I chose these ones to cover because they've been around for a long time, and they're well supported and popular. These three factors make it easy to learn how to get startedd, and find help online when you get stuck trying to figure something out. I encourage you, though, to experiment with other distros as you go. Most of them will teach you something new and broaden your understanding of computing as a larger concept.

Next: What Goes Where

Next, we'll go over some considerations for determining the layout of your homelab.