I have an old laptop lying around and I have been meaning to self host some stuff on it but never got around to it.
My biggest limitation is that I only have WIFI and I do not control the network. It’s basically your default residential WIFI network.
The only thing I actually need is self-hosted cloud. What can I utilize this laptop for?
When you say WiFi to you mean that you only have WiFi access or does the labtop not have a Ethernet port? If you have a wired connection I would get either a thunderbolt or usb3 adapter to hardwire it as a hardwired connection will be more stable even on USB speeds.
The OS will depend on what you want to host. If its a older system with less than 8 GB of ram I would just install Debian with docker. You can find premade docker compose files online which should make deploying software easy.
If you have plenty of hardware you could install Proxmox and then a few VMs.
Edit:
I forgot to mention I started out using Kubesail. https://kubesail.com/ The UI is nice but ultimately I choose to move on for privacy, speed and a Do-It-Yourself attitude
What are the advantages of kubesail? I couldn’t understand it form their website
Its a startup that offers a web dashboard and a proxy for public access. I used it for a while when it was fairly new and there app store made it easy to find and deploy services.