Selfhosted
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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I think a challenge you are likely to run into is that self-hosting many services really ISN'T basic, and there simply aren't comprehensive sources... and really can't be. It's too varied and complex. Every network environment is different, and every network environment is so complex that it takes a networking expert to understand. No tutorial can cover all the possibilities, or even help you figure out what scenario you're in.
As an example, I'm currently migrating from docker-compose to podman-kube-play for my container management. I'm a a professional engineer who works with containers every day, and I've spent the better part of a week trying to get my first non-trivial container to run.
There is simply no single resource on the internet addressing my personal scenario. To get to the bottom of it, I had to know enough about podman, k8s, DNS, networking, firewalls, UFW specifically, where interesting data on my system tends to get logged, and enough about "normal" logs to sift through the garbage and find the logs that lead me to a solution.
So I recommend switching your perspective. Stop looking for a one-stop-shop that doesn't exist. Instead, try to learn when the thing you're trying to do is really 5 different things lashed together with duct tape. Then start deep-diving on each piece until you know enough about that thing to relate it to your specific environment and move on to the next thing. This is time consuming, especially as you're getting started... but it's fractally deep and remains time consuming forever as you continue to learn new things and aspire to do more complicated stuff. This breaking down of complex topics into a series of simpler (but not necessarily simple) topics is the hallmark of every successful engineer I've ever met.
is it worth starting out with podman or is this just some job requirement and docker is perfectly fine for us hobbyists
I'm doing this in my homelab, but I am a pro and so time spent learning arcane details of container ecosystems is not precisely wasted time for me. But I'm not doing it directly for some particular professional requirement, it's more curiosity.
Based on my experience, I don't think I could honestly recommend podman right now for a beginner. The people that tend to be most interested in podman tend to think:
Podman is more modular, is supported by more successful and stable companies can have revenue strategies that don't require them to monetize podman specifically to death, and the individual pieces are small enough to be built and supported by individuals and non-commercial teams if necessary. So I'm sort of betting that over time podman will gain more traction and am willing to invest in learning my way through some bumps in the road as that happens. For beginners, I think you'll know it's time to consider a switch when projects start to ship podman configs instead of docker-compose configs. Then you'll know that those devs think that supporting podman deployments will give them less headaches than supporting docker deployments and we're reaching the inflection point where podman is starting to "win" and legit be easier/better. Right now I'm pretty clearly swimming upstream and I'm ok with that.
But relating back to OP's question, although my usage of podman is a bit bleeding edge... it still illustrates the kind of problems every self-hoster hits and how it's necessary to break those problems down into smaller parts to solve them yourself. It's just not realistic to expect every self-hosting scenario to be fully tutorialized. Tutorials help us understand how the pieces fit together, but when things go wrong we have to understand the pieces and troubleshoot them directly rather than expect the tutorial to dive into fractally complex subject in easy/brief overviews but simultaneously dive into infinitely many edge-cases in depth.
on linux it is probably easier to setup podman nowadays with Podman Desktop and being easily available in most repositories while Docker never released their Desktop app on Linux
on anything else Docker is the least path of resistence currently but who knows if they fuck up again in the future