Ethan Sholly, the driving force behind selfh.st, one of the most recognized communities uniting self-hosting enthusiasts, has published the latest results of his annual survey on the community’s preferences, collecting 4,081 responses from self-hosting practitioners worldwide.
No surprise there: Linux is overwhelmingly dominant, chosen by more than four out of five self-hosters (81%). In other words, for self-hosters operating at bare-metal, virtualised, or container-based infrastructure, Linux remains the backbone.
In fact, this result aligns closely with broader trends: according to Wikipedia, Linux holds a 63% share of global server infrastructure. Aside from the hobby aspect, most respondents said privacy was their main reason for self-hosting, which, as you know, remains one of Linux’s strongest selling points. Now, back to the numbers.
In my experience as a Windows sysadmin, AD and HyperV are the big two.
I will espouse support for AD readily, it’s very good at what it does and connects with M365 with minimal setup. HyperV is also a perfectly cromulent hypervisor, but in that space, They all serve the same function and none I’ve worked with really have a killer feature that sets it apart from the others.
Active Directory is a monster. Got downvoted to hell the other day for saying there is nothing out there that comes close for managing a fleet of machines. Most of the idiot arguments revolved around thinking AD is fancy LDAP.
“Linux and Mac can do authentication!”
If one’s view of AD is that limited, we’re not having the same conversation. Cross connect AD with Powershell and Hyper-V, you have a robust ecosystem for enterprise. And there are zero issues with running headless Linux servers on Hyper-V.