I had found that. A lot of projects are early releases that have not been touched in years - is that because they are stable or because the author gave up before making them useful? Which is why I want not a list but an opinion from someone else doing this.

I have enough of a machinist background to doubt the threads are anywhere close to perfect. However if you are saying more than good enough I will agree.

Or is it better to save a few bucks now and save it for next year when something new comes out that is faster anyway. Maybe there is a new codec that matters in 3 years but nothing today supports: so either way you are forced to replace your server.

There is no right answer, you are taking your chances when planning for the future. There are many computers more than 10 years old still working just fine in the world, and it is possible that whatever you buy today will be as well. We get enough press releases that we can predict what will happen next year close enough, but in 5 years we have much less information. There is no way to know if saving money is a good choice today or not. I can come up with scenarios either way.

Look at power use. Often last generation hardware uses more power for the things you do today and so the few dollars you save today are made up with in the power bill over the next couple years. (though if you use that new hardware to do something the old couldn’t do the new will use more power!)

If there is only a few dollars difference in price go for the best. However when there are hundreds or even thousands of dollars it becomes a harder decision.

Parts fail all the time. The problem with hardware raid is you need a compatible controller or none of the data can be read even though it is still on the physical disks. Computer hardware is often only made for a few months before there is a new model and so you are risking that the manufacture really made the new model work with what you have. That is assuming the manufacture doesn’t go out of business which could happen without warning. \

Also, if hardware breaks that is often a good excuse to replace it - odds are better hardware is available for the same price and sometimes a lot less $ - with hardware raid you are stuck paying whatever price they charge.

Either works fine for most homes. for most homes everything on the nas makes sense as that saves energy vs a second always on box. For enterprises you want them separate because you can’t get cpu’s powerful enough.

Truenas core because I’m a bsd guy at heart. with that all but dead I’m trying to decide between bare freebsd or xigmanas.

I have a arch linux box for things that don’t run on bsd.

Whichever peertube instance you are viewing the video from. Makertube, urbanists.video are two that I use

The website works fine. I don’t understand the app obcession people have. Though newpipe is an option if you must

one nas device with a lot of power and a vpn for the other houses might be better.

The bigger point about cloud that most miss is make sure you are paying them a reasonably price for the service. So long as you are the customer and not the product the cloud can be good.

First question: what will you do about data backup? Nextcloud and Immich both imply important data that you don’t want to lose. You say you have some harddrives, so look for some computer that can take more than one harddrive and then setup RAID with snapshots. I’d go for a RAID setup such that you need two drives to fail before you lose data, but there are plenty of debate. We often say RAID is not a backup - you should start thinking about the next step in your backup setup soon.

Used vs new is always the question. In general the newer the system the less power it will use to do the same work. However ARM will almost always use less power than x86 even if the x86 is much newer. I specified work here, your computer will nothing most of the time so idle power matters too.

Jellyfin is on his nas which we assume has more power.

streaming what? Streaming one mp3s. Streaming a dozen different video re-encoded to something else probably can’t be done any affordable machine.

Maybe. How much does it use when you use it? For lightly used servers idle power matters. However a modern CPU often uses much less power to get the same amount of work done and so if the server is doing something idle consumption isn’t important.

The city in question is in new zealand. While new york may be temperate (though it doesn’t show up in the maps I see - might be looking at maps on my phone) that doesn’t mean it is really comparible.

Four seasons yes, but not cold enough for snow - coldest normal temperture would be -3C. Different plants grow than summer but you can get something if you choose your winter plants. Or maybe you only lose out a month of growing season.

The “medium sized city” in question has a population of less than 100,000 people. I think most of us would call that a small city at most. The city is also has a temperate climate meaning year round growing seasons are possible. Yet still the city would need a lot of farm land around.

In short this doesn’t apply to you. If you are a “survivalists” you best preparation is to the ability to get to a rural place where you will be welcome. They will need extra labor and they have the crops already, but if they don’t know you they may refuse to let you in (or only allow you in as a slave?) If you can’t get out (which you may not be able to!) knowing your neighbors is a good second best, if neighbors looks out for each other they can find a lot of ability to survive and there is some hope that you can grow food in your city.

Self hosting will always remain a hobby thing. Most people won’t give the time need to properly admin their own system and an improperly admined system is a risk that you don’t want to take with your precious data. I can’t blame people for not doing this - there are ball games to watch, saw dust to make, kids to raise, and millions of other things to do with your free time such that you cannot do everything you might want to. Sure most people could learn to do this, but it isn’t a good use of their time.

What the world needs is someone trustworthy and cheap enough to handle data for people who have better things to do. Which is why I have fastmail handle my email. I self host a lot of other things though because I don’t know of anyone I can trust to do a good job for a reasonable price.

Ubuntu has gone downhill a lot in the last decade. I no longer can recommend it. Yes there is a large community, but they make too many questionable decisions and so doing anything “different” will be hard.

You can run docker in docker. I do that all the time (but via scripts so I know it does docker in docker, but I don’t know how they do that).

But again, I wasn’t even trying to run HA in docker, I was running in a VM container and still the above is refused by default.