I remember that! But yeah, it didn’t make any sense back then either.

We all got to learn somewhere!

Lot of good advice here, but sometimes people forget what it’s like to be a beginner. Since you don’t know what you’re doing, I would recommend not trying to host things on your home server and access it from the outside world. That usually involves port forwarding on your router, and that comes with a lot of risks, especially if you don’t know what you’re doing. Others have mentioned it, but a better option when you’re starting off is to rent a vps and host your software there.

Squarespace might work, but my guess is it’ll be easier to transfer your domain elsewhere. You can follow guides for that online and it’s pretty straightforward.

Having a vps, a domain name, you’re most of the way there. On your vps, you’ll want to install a reverse proxy, which is what routes incoming urls to the right place (nextcloud.domain.tld goes here, calendar.domain.tld goes there).

Docker is another thing I’d recommend learning as a lot of what you’ll self host will likely be in a Docker container. I’d watch a few YouTube videos to see how it’s done. This channel has some great videos, and there are others out there.

It seems like a lot, but learn a little here and there and don’t expect to have this all working overnight. You’ll get there!

Same with the Misskey clones. There have been some very dramatic opinions on both sides.

Nextcloud got too bulky for me, and in my search I tried a number of different options before installing OpenCloud without realizing it isn’t fully finished yet. That said, it still works well enough for my use case.

Like OP said, you can get Plasma on Bazzite, as well as install it right on a SteamDeck if you have one. It’s constantly being updated, and if gaming is your main driver, Bazzite goes out of its way to make things work. In theory you wouldn’t have to do any tinkering to get games running, with the added bonus that you won’t be messing up or introducing any entropy to your system files. If something does go wrong, you can reboot into the previous release and it’ll be back to where you just came from.

There’s still plenty to learn if you want to, it’s just not the traditional Linux distro setup.

Tailscale is great for not opening your ports to the internet. Having it playable on a friend’s appletv adds some extra complexity. Reverse proxy on a subdomain with something like fail2ban would work, but it does leave you more vulnerable.

Wait, for real? Gen Alpha doesn’t know what a file type is??

Can’t help with saved game data, but Bazzite is a solid choice, not just because it’s a gaming based distro. It’s one of the immutable distros, so all the important stuff that keeps it running, you can’t mess with (easily). And all your personal stuff that doesn’t keep the computer running, it doesn’t touch. So your computer is always up to date ( faster than steamOS, and if something goes wrong, just reboot into the previous) and you can’t screw it up without trying.

You’re not. If you’re happy with what you’ve got, don’t worry about it. Or join the great Linux tradition of distro hopping. But Mint gets a lot of praise for noobs, but much like Ubuntu there are much better distros out there. It just has name recognition at this point.

Agreed. New users often either go Ubuntu or Linux Mint because they’re well known, but really aren’t the best options out there anymore.

Hundreds have already fallen out of orbit this year alone.

But just think how blazing fast the speeds will be! When they’re hurtling out of orbit and crashing into your house!

Bazzite is just kinoite / silverblue repackaged as Universal Blue, and then modified to preinstall some qol apps and settings. So if you like the original, but don’t want to start with a blank slate, want the nice things out of the box, start with Bazzite/bluefin/aurora (gaming/gnome/KDE).

For people who know what they’re doing/want, starting blank slate makes sense. For newbies or people who don’t feel like dealing with that 🙋🏼‍♂️ the latter is a better recommendation imho

Okay good, you also included Aurora. I agree almost completely with your previous post that mint is outdated, and an immutable is much better for someone who has no idea what they’re doing. No reason to blanket recommend Bazzite, hence the aurora comment.

I’m on Bluefin though, so that’s where we disagree 😏 Don’t know what it is but I’ve never liked KDE.

Yeah, honestly I don’t get all the love for mint whenever this question comes up. Bazzite’s a good choice, I’m running Bluefin it’s sister (same thing but not geared toward gamers) and it’s been great from a set it and forget it perspective. One caution is that they don’t always play nice with dual booting, so make sure you do your due diligence backing up what’s important to you.

Agreed. It was good for that for a long while, but there are much better options for newbies nowadays.

I have a 220+. It works well for what it’s supposed to be. If you want a set it and forget it nas, this is a good one. However, after a year and a half, I’m ready to move on for the same reason I don’t like Apple: too walled garden. It was a great starter nas, but it’s too limiting now. But again, of you don’t want to think about it and just have it work, it’s a good choice.

The LLM for home assistant, or just HA in general doesn’t move the needle? My HA is also pretty low key, but I was considering the idea of running my own small llm to use with HA to get off of OpenAI. My current AI usage is very small, so I wouldn’t need too much on the GPU side I’d imagine, but I don’t know what’s sufficient.

I think I mentioned somewhere, but if not, over the last couple of years I learned a lot about the software side of running my homelab via synology and the vps’s, but I still know almost nothing about hardware, so this is all really useful information. Thanks!

So I want to reduce the cooling, CPU (get one with integrated graphics), and motherboard, and not necessary but look into adding ssd and more memory.

I’m okay with spending a bit up front if it’ll last a long time, but I also don’t want to buy too much and be useless.

Yeah, I posted this assuming I would get a lot of comments about it being more than I needed, and this was already me paring it down. But then I got a lot of comments saying to add more memory, reduce the cooling, and add a ssd but otherwise not much about reducing it.