https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Samba#As_systemd_unit

That’s the guide I followed on my desktop and laptop.

Anything that runs windows can probably run Linux and work well enough for self-hosting. But you’re getting ahead of yourself with worrying about hardware.

Easiest way to start is to find something that you want to try selfhosting that is relatively simple and use WSL within windows to familiarize yourself with Linux/networking/docker.

Once you’re far enough along to know what your needs are, then you can start thinking about the hardware to meet those needs.

When you look at the numbers outside North America, the numbers show even higher % of people using their smartphone as the primary computing device.