Turn your Raspberry Pi into a home server with these 5 operating systems

Home lab projects often involve reusing dedicated server hardware or old PCs into experimentation rigs. While these options look tempting at first glance, you’ll have to contend with increased power consumption and large footprints of the full-sized systems.

As such, Single-Board Computers like the Raspberry Pi serve as solid entry points for newcomers who wish to dip their toes into the world of home lab projects. The best part? There are plenty of operating systems for you to choose from when you’re building a home server with your Raspberry Pi.

Raspberry Pi 5 and Zero W kept near the Milk-V Duo S and Mars SBCs

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4 deciding factors to help you choose between the Raspberry Pi and other SBCs

The community-favorite Raspberry Pi definitely has its perks. But so do SBCs from other manufacturers…

5 FreedomBox

A solid option, assuming you’re on an older RPi model

If you’re using an older, low-memory Raspberry Pi board, FreedomBox is a great way to put your ancient SBC to good use. Compatible with even the Raspberry Pi 2, FreedomBox may not have the largest set of support apps, but it has a simple UI and comes with most of the essential services you’d want to self-host.

Plus, it features multiple quality-of-life features inside the web UI, including automated backups, easy-to-setup DDNS configurations, and SSL certifications. Unfortunately, it’s not compatible with the Raspberry Pi 5 and can only be installed on top of an existing OS using the freedombox package, which is why it lies at the bottom of this list.

A terrific NAS OS that becomes quite formidable with plugins

When you think about FOSS NAS operating systems, OpenMediaVault is one of the first names that comes to mind, and for good reason. It’s an ultra-lightweight OS that, despite featuring low hardware requirements, can provide solid performance in storage-intensive workloads, and can even walk toe-to-toe with hardcore NAS operating systems like TrueNAS Scale once you equip it with additional plugins.

As if that’s not enough, you can even set up Docker – and even virtual machines – on top of your OMV-powered NAS, though you’ll need some extra memory, CPU horsepower, and tons of patience to run a VM or two on a Raspberry Pi.

3 UmbrelOS

The best-looking RPi home server OS out there

Armed with a sleek UI, UmbrelOS is a great option when you want to run containerized applications on your Raspberry Pi without forcing yourself to deal with a bland dashboard. Setting it up is fairly simple, and the built-in app store houses a battalion of services for you to self-host, and you can configure even more apps with the help of Portainer and Dockage.

That said, I’m not particularly fond of the extra emphasis on crypto utilities. However, if you’re willing to overlook this, UmbrelOS stands out as one of the best operating systems for beginners entering the self-hosting landscape.

2 YunoHost

Good for casual home labs, perfect for professional tasks

Despite their miniature size, the Raspberry Pi boards have enough firepower to host small websites as well as CRM and CMS systems. But if you’re not fond of installing multiple packages and managing dependencies, YunoHost is worth checking out.

While the OS boasts a massive suite of self-hosted applications, a large chunk of its app collection caters to the needs of businesses and developers. Like FreedomBox, YunoHost also lets you create, add, and manage custom domains for your Raspberry Pi server from a simple menu-based UI instead of forcing you to set up complex reverse proxy configurations using Nginx.

1 Raspberry Pi OS

A versatile distro that doubles as a killer home server OS

Unlike the rest of the options on this list, Raspberry Pi OS is a desktop operating system first and foremost. But once you include its low resource utilization, top-notch app compatibility, and huge community support, Raspberry Pi OS becomes a highly versatile distro that’s ideal for building a powerful home lab.

If you’re a fan of running containers, you can set up Docker, Portainer, Containerd, Podman, and pretty much every other Linux-based containerization tool on the Raspberry Pi OS. Heck, if you’re confident in your RPi’s ability to run virtual machines, you can even set up KVM on top of this distro. And that’s before you include CasaOS and other self-hosting tools that pair well with the Raspberry Pi OS.

Which home server OS is your favorite?

Besides these options, there are a handful of other Raspberry Pi operating systems that can help satisfy your home lab cravings. If you value performance over all else, DietPi is a worthy competitor to the Raspberry Pi OS with its minimal resource overhead. Having used CasaOS at the beginning of my home lab journey, it’s a tool I recommend every newcomer to check out. Finally, ace tinkerers can even get Proxmox up and running on their Raspberry Pi’s, though you’ll have to deal with low performance and compatibility issues on containers and virtual machines.