Selfhosted

If you’re afraid of the terminal, you won’t get far in self hosting. You should learn to use the terminal. It’s not as scary as people make it sound.

The command line is an exceptionally useful tool, you may want to spend a little time getting familiar with it and common command line tools that would probably make self hosting almost anything easier.

It's like wanting to learn to play guitar but not learning how to restring and tune it, sure it's not necessary but you're going to be overly dependent on others to do something you could learn for yourself with a little time and patience, and it will probably broaden your perspective on what you can do once you do get familiar with how to pipe commands together and combine basic tools into something more sophisticated and complex.

I misread that as "self-loathing" and the answer was obvious.

Unraid is great for beginners.

I am very much a Windows user and my journey went like this:
Raspberry Pi with OMV -> SSH on OMV -> Mostly Terminal on OMV -> Docker + Portainer to deploy containers -> Transition to docker-compose -> Setup my own VM with Debian completely in the CLI (excluding the first setup of the VM)

I use Linux (primarily Debian because of Raspberry as I don't like what I hear about Ubuntu) primarily for VMs and servers and Windows as the client OS

Generally, Linux Servers are best administered from a command line. At least in the beginning to set everything up. In turn they are faster on lower hardware as they dont even have a graphical desktop at all so need less resources. You could of course install a windows server OS. They can be fully administered through Remote Desktop and a GUI.

There are multiple projects to make self hosting more accessible (like casaOS). They automate many steps of the setup and then offer you a webUI for further steps. Maybe have a look here https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted?tab=readme-ov-file#self-hosting-solutions

For what it's worth given the age of this thread and disagreement going on in it, I would recommend Unraid.

Easy for a beginner, with enough to take you up to intermediate level: a web GUI for pretty much all the required terminal commands. It's been around for years, is not going away, but instead getting updated. Works on any old eBay hardware and most of all, the community there are very supportive of beginners. There's also lots of YouTube tutorials.

It ticks all the boxes for easy self hosting. It's just not for Linux protocol purists.

EDIT: I'm learning a lot from this thread, and it's interesting to see how tolerant people are for self hosting. I would add in my vote for Unraid: it allows me to be dynamic with the time I have for self hosting. I'm sometimes extremely busy and don't have the time to keep my self hosting updated, so the web GUI is essential for basic maintenance. Then there are times when I do want to waste an afternoon trying something in terminal and learning more, and that's when Unraid again comes to the rescue. I couldn't self host with 100% terminal, and neither would I want to with 100% GUI. The best self hosting platform is one that can mix them up efficiently and effectively. I am keen to try some others mentioned here, as some look quite interesting. However NAS is a massive element of what I need for my homelab, so Unraid will stay for now.

yunohost

i tried CasaOS for a quick minute. its decent and just has the basics like setting up any disks and then has an app store. its really just a front end for docker and you can manually input the details of any docker containers that arent in the store

ive mostly been running docker stuff on my Synology nas. cant think of the model number now, 218+ i think, but any of the "plus" models will let you run docker. its very similar to Casa, no messing around with command line stuff. ive been self hosting for 10 years now and never touched the command line so i dont know what people are on about here saying you will have trouble

dietpi is another thing ive used on a few devices, mainly small SBCs and raspberry pi's, but i think they might have a version that you can install on anything. its basically just debian, and it has a sort of a wizard that helps set up various things like set up disks and install apps. its headless though so no GUI unless you install one, and the wizard is run from the terminal but youre not having to type any commands at least

Almost all of selfhosting is editing config files, setting permissions and starting/stopping services.

Setting it up so you can administer a server by desktop is probably as hard as learning how to edit config files from a terminal. Maybe harder.

YUNOHost iso is basically just Debian, but the one-click-install for various self-hosted things is it's primary purpose. All done through web interface.

I guess you could install cockpit (via Terminal, sorry, but it's pretty straightforward and there are good guides). After that, you could use the cockpit web interface to deploy docker/podman containers. It's a bit clunky sometimes, but it does the job purely in UI.

You can also manage updates, backups, etc via cockpit if you install the required modules.

As base, I'd use any stable Linux distro that's reccomended for server use.

YUNOhost is designed for this. You can do almost everything graphically via the webadmin. Mine has been running for a couple of years and I'm very happy with it. I have email, XMPP (both of which were installed out of the box), a website, file sharing and a few other things. There are a tonne of apps available, including Fediverse instances, Nextcloud. It's a very cool thing to have available for making self-hosting more accessible.