One thing i’ve learned over the years is the way I did something when I was learning is usually not the best way of doing it, and I later go back and redo everything now that I have gained experience and knowledge. I have decided to ditch google photos, and was lucky enough to snag a free rackmount 2017 server from work with an i7 installed and 2 6tb drives on the way. But now comes the hard part of deciding what software I am going to end up learning on and hopefully living with. First and foremost I want a photo backup service, and I have debated between immich and xpenology, I also know that I want to run Pihole and would really like to self host my own website documenting my projects, even if no one will ever look at it.
If you had to start from the beginning, which OS, which container manager and which containers would you build. I would love the recommendations from those who walked so that I can run
Unpopular opinion: don’t use any of the Truenas, unRAID, freenas, Openmediavault, proxmox stuff. Sooner or later you will run into something those special interest systems can’t do and it will feel annoyingly limiting.
Choose a widely used vanilla Linux distro, Debian or Ubuntu, install everything as docker container, learn how to handle docker compose and how to configure stacks via docker-compose.yml
I made the same conclusion when I tested all the NAS distros for a future NAS. I run Debian 12 with ZFS now and i’m happy.