EDIT: Holy shit, was not expecting so much support for my inquiry. Thank you all for the bevy of ideas and solutions. I think Iā€™m still gonna go for the Intel 12th Gen+ NUC style, although some of your setups seriously made me quite jelly. Maybe Iā€™ll get there one of these days. I update this when I finally lock down my purchase :)

Hey all, lurker for a bit, but just joined because Iā€™ve started my journey of self hosting the simple stuff (or at least I hope itā€™s simple). For the past couple years Iā€™ve been using a RPi Zero W for PiHole, and more recently go into Jellyfin and Home Assistant, using an RPi4 and an RPi3+ respectively. Iā€™ve also got a hand-me-down Synology ds214j NAS with 2x8TB in RAID0 RAID1, which is about half full atm. Iā€™m not expecting to expand that storage anytime soon, so Iā€™ve pivoted to an attempt at combining the 3 Pis above into one NUC/SFF/etc device with a roughly similar power draw. Also looking at re-jumping back into 3D printing using OctoPrint.

Iā€™ve looked briefly at jumping to a Pi5, but that led me down the rabbit hole with Jeff Geerlingā€™s article/video on Pi vs. NUC. Iā€™ve continued to putter around looking at NUCs in the ~$200 range. Hoping to stick with MinisForum, GMKTek, or Beelink if possible, but only becauseā€¦ itā€™s all I know. Iā€™d like to also tinker deeper with Linux flavors, as Iā€™m a noob at best with it but want to at least have some growing knowledge, as Iā€™ve primarily been a Windows gamer and use Apple at the office almost exclusively. Iā€™d like to try staying with AMD as Iā€™ve slowly moved over from the ā€œdark sideā€ (donā€™t hurt me) that is Intel and Nvidia.

Last nugget is that Iā€™ve never tinkered with Docker, as it seems that may be the best route to host all these apps on one contiguous installation. Iā€™ve new-ish to VMs too, so anything ā€œBabyā€™s First VMā€ would be nice.

I know I made a giant pile of wants/needs, so if thereā€™s no magical unicorn, Iā€™m cool with other ideas. Thanks in advance, and Iā€™m really keen on seeing what options I have.

  • Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafeEnglish
    2Ā·
    2 days ago

    Can you be more specific?

    I first ran Proxmox on it (which ran fine, just overkill for my use-case).

    Now itā€™s Windows server and anything I do on it is done in a VM via VMware Workstation (since itā€™s free). So the host os doesnā€™t see much change and any changes that break things can be rolled back via a VM snapshot. Proxmox ZFS would be better for this, but I donā€™t need it, yet.

    You could run any Linux distro on it then use KVM for virtual machines and also docker for things like PiHole and Jellyfin.

    Thereā€™s a million ways to skin a cat, though I like using VMā€™s so if I need to move a service I just copy the VM to a new box. Even my docker stuff is in a VM for just this reason.