There isn’t one. Build incrementally, and adapt and modify as it grows. Starting out, you have no idea where you will eventually end up. It’s a journey and a learning experience bespoke to you. Start with a basic dedicated device as a server that’s cheap. Add a service and get it safe and secure. Once you are happy with it and it is reliable and solid, add another service… Rinse and repeat.

Honestly, filebrowser or filebrowser quantum are what you need. Essentially a web UI frontend for sftp / sshfs. Really simple light weight.

Yeah podman and docker both run on it no problem.

Yeah, again though, that’s a free choice you control. Something you chose to setup.

I personally backup my entire root filesystem to a nas, and update it reasonably regularly. And keep all personal and data files on the nas. Then have a regular automated backup process for the nas.

Many ways to skin a cat as they say. None better than any others, just choices and options. The beauty of Linux 👍

From my perspective, self hosting is a hobby, we run services we feel we need, but it’s also something we do for fun. As such some people enjoy thinking about and deploying the most secure server possible, regardless of actual threats. However, to directly answer your question, yes there isn’t really a lot that can be stolen from a self host residential server, maybe if you hack a valutwarden instance and acquire all the credit card details stored in it and all the id’s stored in it. But the main hack isnt stealing, but deploying a bot net of some sort.

The whole point of Linux to me is I have complete freedom, choice and control of my pc.

The price you pay is the same though, you have the freedom, choice and control of everything your pc does, and if you do something wrong you can break it.

Windows protects you from yourself by giving you almost no freedom, choice and control. That way you can’t break it.

Can’t comment on ente. I looked at it originally along with many others and initially chose photo prism. Ran that for around 6 months then switched to immich. Have no plans on changing any time soon. I host 4 users on it. It works great, been using it over 12 months so been on it from v1, and been through all the changes to V2 and V3 and never had a breaking change. Have auto updates in in podman for it so I never manually touch it. It just works.

I switched from photo prism after 12 months on it, to immich. Much prefer it and offers more and better features from my perspective.

Freedom to say what you want to somebody? Freedom to kill somebody? Freedom to hurt somebody? Freedom to go to war with anybody? Freedom to choose to exclude whoever you want from society?

It is just a very simple clean stable unopinionated rolling release distro. It doesn’t try to be bleeding edge, or force you down any particular path. Its not a derivative of another distro. It uses runit for its init process, no systemd and is just really nice and clean to use. I’ve been on it about 12 months after swapping from arch which I had used for about 15 years. No plans to move any time soon.

Can’t help you with river specifically, but I went from running x11 with openbox, to Wayland with sway. Sway has a really good ecosystem of tools like swaybg for wallpaper. I use waybar, pcmanfm, and rofi.

After 15 years on arch, last year I looked at Gentoo, artix and void. I chose void and have no complaints. It’s a very unopinionated distro, uses runit, rolling release, nice package manager, and works well with just compiling packages you want from source. My arch was heavily optimised and clean, but runit is so simple to use and boot times are insane. After post, my boot is around 3 seconds. Shutdown is about 1-2 seconds.