Today I set up my old laptop as a Debian server, hosting Immich (for photos), Nextcloud (for files), and Radicale (for calendar). It was surprisingly easy to do so after looking at the documentation and watching a couple videos online! Tomorrow I might try hosting something like Linkwarden or Karakeep.
What else should I self-host, aside from HA (I don’t have a smart home), Calibre (physical books are my jam), and Jellyfin (I don’t watch too many movies + don’t have a significant DVD/Blu-ray collection)?
I would like to keep my laptop confined to my local network since I don’t trust it to be secure enough against the internet.
edit: I forgot, I’m also hosting Tailscale so I can access my local network remotely!
There a million ways, and you will probably find tons of tutorials each different - Docker, Docker Compose, native install, VMWare, Kubernetes, Portainer, etc. I recommend starting with a clean machine - preferably with an attached monitor - and installing your favorite Linux distro (Ubuntu is among the easiest), getting Docker and Docker Compose running, and familiarizing yourself with these technologies.
Then you can start with a simple app like Paperless (document digitization), Vikunja (TODOs), BookStack (wiki), or PrivateBin (pastebin), getting it running and persist state over a period of time, then setting up a reverse proxy so you don’t have to use IPs all the time (with just editing your hosts file to point a URL to IP of your machine), and then it is a free world.
Of course, having the whole setup secure, independent, and easily manageable is partially eyperience and partially understanding your needs.
You will probably even find whole ready-to-deploy git repositories that are easily configurable, so you can go with that too.