I have an old laptop lying around and I have been meaning to self host some stuff on it but never got around to it.
My biggest limitation is that I only have WIFI and I do not control the network. It’s basically your default residential WIFI network.
The only thing I actually need is self-hosted cloud. What can I utilize this laptop for?
When you say WiFi to you mean that you only have WiFi access or does the labtop not have a Ethernet port? If you have a wired connection I would get either a thunderbolt or usb3 adapter to hardwire it as a hardwired connection will be more stable even on USB speeds.
The OS will depend on what you want to host. If its a older system with less than 8 GB of ram I would just install Debian with docker. You can find premade docker compose files online which should make deploying software easy.
If you have plenty of hardware you could install Proxmox and then a few VMs.
Edit2:
Actually I take back what I said, don’t use Kubesail. I went back and tried it and it has a lot of issues. If you want remote access consider a VPN or remote vm