Mynodebtc if you actually want normal control over everything. Umbrel and start9 make it aggravating to customize your node, if at all...

Umbrel on Debian or Ubuntu. Best UX; but start9 is catching up quick.

If you want to learn; then go with option #3

If you are capable of doing it yourself, just install Bitcoin Core and Electrs yourself. I use this as a guide but I don't follow some of the recommendations for service security and nginx proxies and stuff. Just need the basics. Incredibly useful guide for learning how to set up anything as a service on Linux actually!

I really didn't find setting everything up difficult. You can take it a step further and get LND set up too. That's easy but managing Lightning stuff is very new to me.

I have tried Start9, Umbrel, and a couple others and my biggest complaint is you install it as an entire OS or docker containers which you cannot configure differently. Like if you want to change the Bitcoin directory. You can do it, but it can lead to some unexpected problems. It is way easier to set up everything yourself if you are capable of doing it.

Umbrel is great for testing, but none of these things I would ever use in any serious capacity

In addition to running your own node, if you want to see what sort of apps you might want to set up yourself check this absolutely massive list out https://github.com/kahun/awesome-sysadmin and https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted

Buy a Mac mini off of eBay. Even a 2012 one will work great. But Start9’s StartOS on there.

That’s the best solution I’ve found.

Umbrel is all flashy but a worse ecosystem imo.

Start9 may appear to be moving slower yet is a more open an innovative platform.

If your server has the resources, I recommend installing Proxmox. It's Debian based but it's a type 1 hypervisor that lets you easily spin up virtual machines.

This way, you can run multiple Umbrel instances on the same server hardware. I use one Umbrel for LN, one Umbrel just to have a spare copy of the Blockchain, and another Umbrel for media, and non-BTC stuff.

You could even spin up a VM and try all three of your options on the same box at the same time!

The learning curve is not that bad especially if you've used type 2 hypervisors like virtualbox.

In addition to VMs proxmox let's you do fancy stuff like RAID, backups, and high availability clusters. If you have at least 3 servers running proxmox, you can even do live VM migrations from one server to another. This feature is super cool because it lets you migrate your LN node to another hardware without missing a single route or needing to shutdown your node.

minibolt.info

Start9 💪

What about a Sovran Pro? https://sovransystems.com.

What is your main primary goal with this? The reason I ask is that if your goal is learning bitcoin lightning I'd say go with the Umbrel or Start9 because you can get up and running very fast. If you don't care that much about getting deep with customization these options are great. If you want deeper learning on how these tools work and think you'll do more custom stuff follow the advice of others in this thread. If you want to deepen your knowledge of self hosting in general I'd go as low level as possible. All of these approaches are valid depending on your goals. Also, you can start with one and switch to another but if you think you wanna go deep now I'd go for it now vs. migrating from Umbrel to a custom configured node.