Most people build a home lab dashboard to solve a very practical problem. It makes sense — a dashboard is designed to be a central place to access services or status information of your services and to avoid digging through browser bookmarks every time you need to open something. The problem is that most dashboards tend to look similarly clean, modern, and functional, but they're not particularly fun or memorable.

Recently, I came across a project called Homelab for Workgroups. It's an open-source dashboard that recreates the look and feel of a Windows 3.1 desktop. That alone was reason enough for me to keep it installed on my stack, but the fact that it lets me get to my self-hosted apps while giving them a fun twist made it an immediate recommendation.

A Windows 3.1-inspired desktop for your homelab

Replacing bookmarks with something a bit more fun

I've, of course, used dashboards before, but for the most part my setup has been embarrassingly simple. I either remembered addresses manually or relied on browser bookmarks. It's a solution that works, but it's not particularly efficient. Finding the right service can often mean a bookmarks folder filled with links that look pretty similar. This open source app replaces that with a home page that looks and feels like an old Windows desktop straight from my childhood.

Nostalgia is a powerful drug, but you do need functionality as well. Homelab for workgroups displays your services as desktop shortcuts. When you open a service like Immich, it feels like opening an application, but it's really just a bookmark to the home page of the server, of the service that's running on your NAS. In fact, the entire experience leans heavily into replicating the look and feel of an operating system, except it's running in your browser window.

A launcher that puts your services front and center

A reminder that self-hosting should also be fun

The nostalgic design is what grabs attention at first, but the underlying concept is also pretty solid. Instead of treating self-hosted services as websites, it gives them the appearance of applications, that actually does make sense when you think about how we use all the services running on our home lab. These are all, after all, individual applications, but we tend to access them through a browser.

Configuring and adding new services is also deceptively simple. The dashboard organizes content through simple JSON configuration files instead of a complicated administration interface. You can create categories or group links together and customize the desktop without spending too much time learning a brand new system or schema. Similarly, I appreciate the fact that the project is focused on essential navigation instead of trying to become yet another monitoring platform. There's enough of those already.

Way too many homelab dashboards attempt to pull statistics from every service on your server and also display things like widgets and graphs to become a complete control center. There is some value in it, for sure, but it also adds complexity. Homelab for Workgroups takes the opposite route. It just behaves like a launcher. When you sit down at your computer, and need to access something, you just open one page without having to navigate your way through a complex project management system.

Now I could talk in depth about the simplicity of the system and how it takes literally seconds to add new services to this home lab dashboard. The reality of it is that, while I came here for simplicity, it's this Windows 3.1-inspired interface that has made sure that it stays as my current dashboard. It just adds a lot of personality to my setup, which is otherwise fairly modern and certainly technical.

While home labs can often become endless optimization projects, and that's something that anybody deep into the self-hosting rabbit hole will know and agree with, it's easy to forget that the system is also supposed to be a hobby and for your own enjoyment. While Home Lab for Workgroups is far from the most functional or feature-packed piece of software, it's lightweight, barely takes any resources, launches rapidly, and does just one thing, but does it well. Well, technically it does two things. It does look pretty as well.

Sometimes simple is all you need

At risk of repeating myself, let me be clear. If you're looking for the most feature-packed dashboard, you should look at alternatives like Grafana or my other dashboard, DockPeak. They're all great at giving you quick access to your services, but also additional features like the ability to track updates for your Docker containers or to be able to graph out information from your stack. You're not going to find any of that over here.

What you'll get here is a pretty-looking, retro-inspired interface which is easy to configure, uses barely any resources, and will give you a hint of nostalgia while you click and launch your favorite services at home. That's the headline feature. In fact, that's pretty much the only feature, but not every open-source or self-hosted app has to become an entire system. Unique services like these are what I got into self-hosting for.

H4W: Homelab for Workgroups is a simple Windows 3.1-inspired launcher for all your favorite services