I have an old as eff laptop hiding behind my TV, and I use Unified Remote to make my phone act like a wireless mouse and keyboard for it.

Also, Proxmox is basically the answer to “I hate big tech and have a lot of time to kill. How do I deal?” Make one computer into 30 mini servers.

Thumbs up! Refind plus mint and you have yourself a nice little machine! This is my “music when I game” or “quick Google the walkthrough” secondary machine. Mine might be older though.

Ah hah! I went to write “Fedora”, and someone beat me to the punch! I find that you’ll get a lot of Bazzite, Silverblue, KDE Neon, Pop OS recommends, but I find that Mint and Fedor tend to work without too much fussing. I sometimes need to get rpmfusion or flathub stuff for Fedora to be 100% for me, but it really works quite wonderful after that. Mint is funny, because it’s the one everyone recommends for beginners, and, well, I keep coming back to it. It somehow manages to be more reliable than the Ubuntu base it’s built on.

I already have an e-ink second screen that sits on the back of an iPhone… 4? 5? It’s collecting dust in a drawer, but I swear this is a recycle of an old project. It’s already been done!

Also, I have an old Yotaphone.

I run substreamer and tailscale to access my home navidrome. Works like a charm.

I have a docker compose immich that I somehow managed to kill fourteen minutes after convincing my wife to switch to it.

I’m a bit farther along, but it’s all been trial and error (and error, and error…) So, commenting because I would also like some of this info. My DNS is a disaster! Still using IPs to access my VMs, mostly.

Oh, I’ve done messes like this… I had a machine whose UEFI had like five things on it. This doesn’t solve it all, but I really like refind for taking care of whacky multi boot scenarios. Just install it and it scans all the drives in a system for OSes and gives you a menu on startup.
There are various VM solutions out there to handle running one-off windows programs, by the way. I have a copy of Win11 inside a Proxmox VM that runs those few times I need desktop Office for something specific. I’m sure others will come in with better solutions, but those are the ones I’ve used.

Back when I first started with NextCloud, it was pretty unresponsive on the web front end for my ebook collection, which was a ton of small files. It’s gotten a whole lot better in the last year or so. Now, I don’t worry about it. This is also with a very badly set up copy. I’m sure that a proper install would work much better, too.

I have a couple of friends with nextcloud, and I have nextcloud too. Low tech ish? But we just host our files on Nextcloud and then copy backups to the other machines every now and then.

My NC uses about 6gb of RAM, and it is really badly optimized, since it’s been running forever and isn’t a container, or even a server deploy. (It’s a snap running in desktop Ubuntu since 2016.)

Anyone could do better, I just can’t be bothered.

My buddy has his running on 1.5GB of RAM in a container.

I also host a bunch of other stuff. Navidrome and freshrss get the most use, other than Nextcloud. Immich, searx-ng, jellyfin, guacamole.

The most powerful proxmox cluster… Ever!

My first gen Framework 13: Fingerprint reader, check! (Fedora KDE). Screen, ports, performance, check! Sound, WAY better than my ThinkPad. Touchpad… cough cough

I’ve always found that there’s generally a new way to do things in Linux, but I rarely have issues. I have an Acer Nitro laptop with a Ryzen integrated AMD graphics and then an Nvidia 3060, and I had to look up how to install the drivers, which was rpmfusion, click, click, done. Instead of the usual launcher for games, it’s either Steam or Lutris. The only real bitch of a thing was some school stuff. Like, gnomes boxes handles all my virtualization, but school demanded VMware Workstation, which was legitimately a pain on Fedora. Likewise, Microsoft Teams. But web Office was fine, Libre locally… I get hella better frame rates on MHW in Linux than Windows. I didn’t pick the machine for its Linux compatibility, it just worked.

I just did three nodes this evening from 8.4.1 to 9, no issues other than a bit of farting around with my sources.list files.

Not noticing anything significant, but I haven’t tried the mobile interface yet.

Feel free to ask questions if you have them. I am no expert, but I am willing to try to help if you get stuck.

1. You are going to find people who have done both. A lot of NAS devices run kind of low powered CPUs so separating it out into two devices can get you more compute power than a single device. For example, an old as the hills file bay may cost next to nothing, and then using your “last” desktop will get you a lot more storage and compute than a 1500$ modern NAS, but it’ll take up more space, cost more in electricity to run, and make more fan noise. This is the route I went. A modern NAS should be able to run what you listed though.
2. TrueNAS scale is all about storage, but it lets you also run containers. Proxmox is all about virtualization, but you can then run a storage solution inside a VM or container. It’s not the kind of thing you’re going to get a right answer for because either way can work. Both are well-documented, capable solutions. I have tried both at times, but I had a lot more experience with Proxmox by the time I deployed TrueNAS, so I stuck with Proxmox and use a TrueNAS box (bare metal) for backups. It really is a matter of preference.
3. If you have a MiniPC and NAS as separate devices, you will want to set up a network share, so you can seed on the MiniPC the copy that’s on the NAS. My seeding, Jellyfin, Plex, etc, all happen in a virtual hard drive mounted in a separate container from the services. Each of the services "see that drive as a network share despite being hosted on the same physical hardware.

I have a Tiny connected to a startech dual USB drive dock. The drives get warm, but not deadly hot. Moving big files is a bit slow, but for streaming on Plex and Jellyfin it works fine.

I didn’t know anything about docker when I set up my NC years ago, so I ran it as a snap on bare metal. Man, it’s gotten so much better! It used to really suck. Like, simple file transfers just didn’t work half the time, so I’d be retrying the same thing over and over… A few years ago, I literally migrated it from bare metal to a VM, but kept the exact same install. I have so much crap on it now, I think I’ll never bother switching it out to docker, just because of the inconvenience. I know the snap version can just run using a local hostname, you just have to set it in trusted domains setting. Might be the same in the docker image?

I used to work on a support desk for a big company. I had a bunch of friends in similar roles at other companies. Fun fact: there are no good support desks. The incentives are all skewed. If a support desk makes the customer happy, it’s giving refunds out. If it’s giving refunds out, it’s costing the company money. If it’s costing the company money, someone in finance or accounting will “fix the problem.” In the case of my company, the fix was: 6 minutes per call, no more. Every call is a sales opportunity, no exceptions. So, people would call in with big, complicated problems, and before I was allowed to help them, I had to try to sell them shit, which pissed them off, got them ranting. This ran out the clock, so then we “accidentally” disconnected. Leather, rinse, repeat. Now, my company sucked, but even the best companies need to limit churn and refunds and deal with a lot of entitled assholes on the support line, so it’s never going to be a great time.

I use Gpoddersync to keep my phone and tablet in sync, but I have one podcast that keeps glitching out and redownloading over and over. Not sure why.