Selfhosted

I tried with a Celeron 1 GHz. It was slower than a rpi and it sucked 65 watts at idle 🙈

But at least can give some experience, I prefer playing the sysadmin with real hardware than a VM

It’s doable but you should treat it more as a learning opportunity than a production system. Honestly, that’s old enough that a RPi might be able to run circle around it.

The Celeron 1011 is a 32bit processor, so Debian or Gentoo may be the only distributions that still support it and you will probably have to compile from source anything you want to run. A gig of ram was good for its time.

The Linux Unplugged crew from Jupiter Broadcasting are currently doing a 32bit challenge to see if such systems are still usable for day to day usage. It’s going to be interesting.

If you get tired of that, you can probably turn it into a virtual fish tank and Johnny Castaway machine. (1GHz atom, 1gb RAM, XP)

I wouldn't dare to charge that old battery up. Some of them can start a fire.

I've got Pi-hole and Syncthing running on an old netbook with an Atom CPU and 2 GB RAM. It's doing fine. Syncthing killed the little dual-core CPU while it was syncing all of the stuff I wanted, but now it idles along quietly on Debian. I doubt you're going to get much out of the machine, but it's perfectly fine for small, simple stuff like Pi-hole.

Distro-wise, I'd say Debian or similar if you want to set-and-forget (update once a week or month) or Arch/openSUSE Tumbleweed if you want it up-to-date (potentially more work needed).

Considering the hardware I'd also recommend whichever distro you go with without a GUI to keep the resource usage as low as possible.

You'll probably save money in the long run using a pi.

Worst case, give it a go, learn the process even if it can't handle it, and you'll be able to do it easier when you have a capable machine.

Go for a vintage correct OS for a challenge, try Haiku!

DietPi (it runs on PCs)

Be aware that some old laptops had weird combined chipsets that Linux just can't use... I tried putting Linux Mint on a friend's laptop for their kids to use and the networking (wifi and cable) just wouldn't work... it was something that only Win98 / WinXP could use (from memory).

So just try anything in case you just need to ditch it - as someone else mentioned, treat it as a learning exercise.

Upgrade ram to the max and set zram and everything will be good to go

I started out self hosting on a laptop maybe a little newer than yours. Pentium, 2gb RAM. I'm happier with my pi, but it's more than enough to get started on. Pretty sure pi-hole will run no problem, the others my struggle a little bit depending on your disk speed.

Your cpu will be a pretty limiting factor, but upgrading the RAM and putting in an SSD could boost the performance quite a bit.

No

It depends on the size of your budget (if it exists at all). Your probably better off doing some e-waste dumpster diving. Shoot for something with a 3rd gen i3 / i5 or newer and at least 4gb of RAM.

That generation is when Intel added MPEG hardware encoder so it opens up a lot of options for self-hosting media servers.

I would look into buying a mini PC and throwing a hypervisor on it.

Alpine. But you are very low on the RAM. I will buy more RAM if I can (DDR2(?)).

you can probably even host your firewall in it

Maybe. You limiting factor is going to be power and thermals. I started on a broken laptop and moved to a minipc when I first started.

I don't know about the whole 'arr suite but one BT client and PiHole should not be a problem. Provided you don't seed hundreds of torrents, but even that may work out ok-ish depending on the BT client – some of them like Transmission or rTorrent are more efficient than qBitTorrent or Deluge.

It sounds too slow. Save yourself time and sanity.

Puppy Linux!

Xubuntu, Lubuntu, Gentoo, Peppermint...

Some others like damn small linux or nano Linux or Linux lite.

I self host using Debian on a 2010 macbook pro with a core 2 duo in it. It works well.

I run some of my services (until very recently including jellyfin) on my HP pavilion G6 from 2007. It still runs my wireguard, backup pihole, heimdall, etc. I run it on Linux mint (it was familiar) and cant do most things on screen (lags hard) but I can ssh or VNC in just fine

I tried this recently with a 10 year old laptop. Much better specs than that. 6GB RAM, ran W10 incredibly slowly due to HDD.

I couldn't even boot the Ubuntu USB installer.

Any distro. Energy consumption may be higher. Apart from that all good (I guess)

Edit: I did manage to install Puppy Linux onto it, but I was severely limited by the CPU which is 32bits. I'm trying another old laptop next! Thanks everyone!