I recently decided to give my old desktop a second life instead of letting it collect dust. It’s a 15+ year old machine with an Intel Core 2 Duo and 4 GB RAM.
I installed Debian 13 and turned it into a small home server. So far, I’m running OpenSSH, Samba, Nginx, and a Laravel + Next.js application on it.
The most valuable part of the project wasn’t the services themselves—it was learning more about Linux permissions, users/groups, ACLs, and service management while setting everything up.
I was also surprised by how usable the system still is despite its age.
