Every single time I talk to my friends, whom also want an *arr/Plex/VPN/Home Assistant setup like I’ve got, I can see the fear in their eyes when I mention Debian, Docker, and the terminal. It could be a case of “git gud”, but I want to help them out with a setup like this, but with as low friction as possible. Ideally something completely GUI based, and very low maintenance.
I know of unRAID, and Portainer, but does anyone have any experience in setting up something like this for people whose knowledge of self hosting and networking aren’t as good as yours?
https://www.openmediavault.org/ or https://yunohost.org have a nice web-gui that allows you to control most things.
But to be honest, these are only to make the entry easier and convenient for maintenance. Sooner or later something will likely break and then you will have to be at least a tiny bit comfortable with the terminal. If you are unwilling to learn that, then self-hosting is probably not the right thing for you.
+1 for yunohost. You have to spend a minute on the command line to bootstrap the installer then it’s nice GUI all the way.