Whats your budget?

My go-to recommendation is the barebones CWWK N100 development board. Then you can add as much RAM and storage as you want. Up to 4xNVMe and 2x SATA drives are supported.

It also uses a normal PC fan jnstead of those whiny-ass laptop fans.

Thats what I use.

Oh good it’s not just me then…

Negative, Ghost Rider. But there are plenty of public ones. Try AdminForge.

My friends could not care less. I even offered to let them use it for free. They just mock me about it.

If I wanted that I would just buy Synology/QNAP/Zima, etc.

So do mine. I quit anyway.

This is why I have a desktop for gaming and a laptop for everything else.

Yes, they all do

The purpose is simplification. Ive tried them all and Yunohost is the best of the bunch. Though theyre all missing featured that others have.

GParted

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You can do either. I did add it to a stock Debian image because the image they provide didn’t work for me on several devices.

Install Debian 11. Manage it with Yunohost. It gives you a GUI and automates most of the configuration.

Photon is incredible.

siiiiiick Aqara is always one of my top choices

I didn’t say I was good at it. I’ve used various GUIs that simplify things a bit (Yunohost, CasaOS, ZimaOS, Runtipi, Unraid, TrueNAS, etc. but they all seem to be missing different things that each other have. Yunohost makes things as simple as possible.

I’ve worked in auto repair and real estate. Have no professional experience.

Why self-host? Because its cool. And for privacy. And save a few bucks on subscriptions.

I can see it

If all you want is HA, it’s perfectly fine to run on a RPi.

But personally I’ve grown to host about a dozen other services so the additional compute power, storage and memory is important.

Seriously, lots of employees depend on VPNs to access their work computers. VPNs are also a great way to ensure the hotel isn’t snooping your internet traffic.