Looks good.

Only thing I would caution on is all of that USB storage. USB isn’t exactly known for it reliability when used long term for storage devices. Given the current market, however, It will do. When you can afford to, I would move the server into a tower with the storage on SATA.

When I first discovered Linux 20 years ago, I was trying to get a computer up and running for my sister to use to write her homework on. The first distro I tried that mostly worked on that ancient Athlon proc was Ubuntu.

I wound up switching to Ubuntu from Windows XP on my personal computer because I liked that it didn’t try to hide anything from me. I could (and did, often resulting in me needing to reinstall) twist all of the knobs and dials of the OS. The entire world of software that was entirely free to use, that I wasn’t blocked from using because I was poor…was the icing on the cake.

About 5 years ago, I was gifted a new PC with Windows 10 preinstalled.and I decided to give it a try for a while and as long as I was only playing games, working on a text document, or watching Youtube, it was fine. But as soon as I tried to actually do something either sysadmin related or creative, it felt like the OS constantly fighting me.

WSL helped with the sysadmin stuff (mostly, but not with anything related to Windows itself) but if I was working on music, forget it. It was like working covered wet cement. I was always fighting the OS to do whatever it was I was trying to do.

I wound up wiping it and installing Linux on it after about a year of fighting Windows. First NixOS (which I liked) before going back to the distro I know best. Ubuntu.

For me, now, computers are not the toy they were in my youth. They’re a tool. The best tool for a particular job is usually the tool you already know how to use. I know Linux, I can’t say the same for Windows.

I’ve gotten old enough that I no longer have the time to study and really learn how everything in a new OS, or even new piece of software works. So, I stick with what I know until I run into a job that requires me to learn a new tool. Doesn’t happen often anymore.

I’ve been with NameCheap for over a decade. They’re a relatively quiet company that’s been around a while.

They’ve never done anything to make me want to change providers. Have my email through them as well. Good uptime. Ok-ish prices. Good customer service the one time I’ve needed it. Web site takes some getting used to, but it’s also never changed since I started using them.

Generally, it’s as simple as just deleting the Windows NTFS partition. I would leave the others for now. Depending on how you installed your distro they may be related to your Linux installation. Deleting them could prevent you from booting into your Linux installation.

I’m not as familiar with UEFI as BIOS, but I believe UEFI uses a FAT formatted partition for booting into the OS proper.

You may need to adjust the boot order in your UEFI/BIOS afterwards to get it to boot back to Linux afterwards, but that is fairly uncommon in my experience.

The most likely issue you might run into is accidentally wiping your active Linux partition instead of the Windows one.

I would make backups and have your distros install disk handy before you wipe the partitions.

Afterwards, you can resize your linux root to include the now free space or move your home directory to the new partition after formatting it. Your call.

I run both Navidrome and Jellyfin. I would say that Navidrome is probably simpler of the two to setup if you’re only interested in music.

In both cases uploading new music is the same. Upload the tracks to your media directory and wait for the next scan.

:-D

I’m in no position to toss to much shade at the data hoarder community. I’m personally sitting on close to 64TB of media I’ve collected over the years. In my case, most of it legitimately acquired, either by myself or by family, but still. It adds up and most of it hasn’t been accessed more than once or twice.

So long as you don’t need to stockpile old shows you never watch, you can get by on an old laptop and possibly an external drive.

My homelab started out on a Raspberry Pi 2b. Most of the hardware Ive brought online were dumpster specials someone else didn’t want. It can be done on the cheap. Won’t necessarily be reliable, but it can be done cheap.

Well, glad I walked away from SmartThings a couple of years ago. Went with Home Assistant and have never looked back.

At the time I remember being concerned about whether they were going to kill SmartThings off or start charging a subscription as the hub called home for everything. Server time costs and they weren’t charging for it. TANSTAFL. Kinda surprised it’s still alive at all

Yes. Currently using Gemma4:12b behind OpenWebUI and Hermes Agent plus a few lighter models for OCR and tagging in Paperless.

From what I’ve noticed, yes. Considerably.

I’m not knowledgeable enough to explain why, but something about running Baremetal --> VM --> Docker --> Nextcloud-AIO is massively slower than running Baremetal --> Docker --> Nextcloud-AIO. Hell, Nextcloud-AIO on a Pi4 was running faster than when I put it in a much roomier VM.

Someone tried to explain it to me but all I understood was that the databases don’t like that. Something about nested virtualization restricting performance.

Oddly I didn’t run into the same issue when I ran Nextcloud-AIO off of a Digital Ocean VPS. Not sure what they are doing differently, but that was running just as fast as bare metal.

I use Nextcloud to host my calanders. With caldav (what nextcloud uses under the hood), reminders are handled by the client. I use Apple’s Reminders app on my phone and Thunderbird on my laptop.

Nextcloud does have a built in calandering app, but I’ve not used it much. I think it can do email notifications of calander events.

It’s all good. The name came out a random name generator a while back. I liked the name enough that I started using it generally for my fediverse presence. No meaning beyond that.

I currently run the official Nextcloud-AIO. No issues once I got the reverse proxy figured out. That was a bit of a pain at the time. Caddy hadn’t yet become a popular choice for reverse proxies.

I will say that Nextcloud really wants dedicated hardware, not a VM, or proformance will suffer. Still useable but it tends to to be a bit slower. Can’t vouch for the office suite as I just don’t use it.

I’ve had mixed success with the open source drivers for printing. Sometimes they work, sometimes not. Just depends on the individual printer model. Newer models seem to just work.

Attached scanners though always seem to need their proprietary drivers to function.

Up side, Brother doesn’t seem to pack in any useless software with their Linux drivers.

Brother Printers have a well deserved reputation. They work. You will probably need their proprietary drivers (which you can get from their website), but after that they just work.

I know they make a .deb available, but I think there’s also a .rpm if you’re repping Redhat land.

It’s been a while since I used it, but I think kmymoney has some basic features in that direction.

With the caveat that I last played with Gentoo 20 years ago… I am almost certainly a bit out of date.

If I remember correctly it, it explicitly recommended that you use at least the minimal gentoo live disk to get your system into a running state. You’d be working from the live cd for the first couple of sections before booting into a very basic install on your hard disk. From there you would compile the rest of your system.

Even the minimal disk provides all of the tools that you need to bootstrap the system. Sources for everything else are downloaded as they are needed. Come to think of it, I think the full desktop live dvd was fairly new at that time, in it’s first or second release.

Even at that time the Gentoo manual was incredibly well written and is in my opinion the gold standard for how user documentation should be written. I had been toying with linux for about 3 months at that point and was able to get a working desktop system up and running in about a month , mostly just waiting for things to compile on the slow processors we had back then. I would run a few commands and then go off and do something else for a few hours. rinse and repeat.

Linux has run on ARM procs for some time. Software is a little hit or miss, but most things have a compiled build for it at this point. A lot of the big servers are running ARM processors due to potential power savings.

The popularity of the Raspberry Pi really increased the number of projects with ARM builds as well. It’s been possible to run a pretty decent desktop stack for 10 or 15 years. When the Pi2B came out.

If you happen to run across a project that is not available on ARM you might give a go at compiling it yourself. About half of the time it’s not too difficult and a good beginner project.

Most of the time I use Nextcloud. If I can’t wait for the file to sync I’ll use either email or a jump drive depending on which devices I’m moving data between. I

If I remember that I can, I’ll occasionally use bluetooth to send from my phone to one of my computers.

Last I checked (roughly 2 years ago, preRAM price spike) SBCs weren’t the most cost effective option for self hosting anymore. I would actually look into used thin clients or desktops. Even new, the hardware is often less expensive and more capable than SBCs. Sometimes they’re also more power efficient.

As for community support for the SBCs other than RPi, for most of them it has been close to non existent. Some better than others but the RPi was the community favorite and got all the attention due to its low price at the time.