This is what I use and it’s quite impressive.
https://community.home-assistant.io/t/simple-scheduler-addon/174326

I’ve had it for a few years and it never has failed to run on time every time. Can automate more than lights with it and it’s really just a point/click set and forget type of thing. My setup for my lights. :)

If your router supports Freshtomato firmware, it also has adguard you can enable too.

Like others have said Arch is not as intimidating as it would appear to be. Over the last couple of years, they improved IHMO the most difficult process for the average user of installing Arch. You now just run archinstall Then follow the system prompts. It’s constantly being improved. If you do go with Arch, aside from using Pacman to install apps, you can use “Yay” or “Paru” or others which pull from the vast AUR repository.

I used Arch for a few years and recently moved over to Aurora Linux (Immutable KDE distro adapted from Fedora’s CoreOS and uBlueOS which is an offshoot of CoreOS) Specifically, I use the Developer experience of Aurora which gives you a VSCode type of editor as well as Podman desktop included as well as other items. It’s meant for those who wish to develop and not have to worry about keeping the system up to date. It runs updates in the background and rebooting your system will run the updates.

The reason I left Arch was simple, I used to like to live on the edge of software as well, until it took one too many hastily released updates which borked my Arch system. My home PC has morphed from being my dedicated computer to my wife’s and my computer which is fine, but I’d like to keep it available for her avoiding the need to do a repair because an update broke it.

Keep an eye out for the KDE Linux OS which they have in development and not yet for use, but is earmarked for being the official immutable OS for KDE which will receive their bleeding edge updates. https://linuxiac.com/kde-announced-its-kde-linux-distro/ https://community.kde.org/KDE_Linux

I plan on migrating to that once it’s finished. :) I’ve become a fan of immutable OS’s because they allow you to roll back if something should go wrong. Which it rarely does :)

This is anecdotal, only to say that the Linksys WRT-54G IMHO is/was a beast in the SOHO world. Back in 2013, I worked for the county replacing older equipment and it was time to upgrade the router in the fairgrounds lobby at the start of summer. Up we went to the rafters where it was and it was quite dusty in there, tons of pigeon feathers and miserably hot in the attic as most are. We pulled the router from service and replaced it with the new one already configured. The wrt54G was COVERED in dust, Pigeon droppings and feathers stuck to it. It ran forever that way I suspect. From what I was told, is was installed about 7 or 8 years prior, maybe longer.

To this day, I think Linksys must have partnered with Nokia’s wizards for how sturdy that router was/is. You can still find them in our second hand stores and most people push DD-WRT on them. But since they are 10/100, they’re not as popular anymore.

You could always use ntfy.sh if you are wanting to keep it light weight, I know there seems to be a heavy following and happy community with it. I personally use Gotify which has been nice and easy to use and just works for my needs. :) I looked at the shoutrrr repo and it seems to be either abandoned or just no longer updating maybe because their is no need to in the Dev’s eyes. They also develop Watchtower which hasn’t been touched in about 2 years ago. I have never had any issues with Watchtower so I think it may not need much maintenance. I do see though that they are working on a new project: https://github.com/containrrr/shepherd but it’s also a bit stale.

I discovered about a few months ago that XCP-NG does not support NFS shares which was a huge dealbreaker for me. Additionally, my notes from my last test indicated that I could not mount existing drives without erasing them. I’m aware that I could have spun up a TrueNAS or other file sharing server to bypass this, but maybe not if the system won’t mount the drives in the first place so it can pass them to the TrueNAS . I also had issues with their xen-orchestra which I will talk about below shortly. They also at the time, used an out of date CentOS build which unless I’m missing something, is no longer supported under that branding.

For the one test I did which was for a KVM setup, was my Home Assistant installation, I have that running in Proxmox and ccomparativelyit did seem to run faster than my Proxmox instance does. But that may be attributed to Home Assistant being the sole KVM on the system and no other services running (Aside from XCP-NG’s).

Their Xen-Orchestra for me was a bit frustrating to install as well, and being locked behind a 14 day trial for some of the services was a drawback for me. They are working on the front end gui to negate the need for this I believe, but the last time I tried to get things to work, it didn’t let me access it.

I liked them enough to purchase a total of 8, so yes. Once integrated, they are quite fast no delays that I’ve seen so far. I have 3 in the living room (our apartment doesn’t supply any overhead lighting), and usually run them white all the time, but on the rare occasion, I do like to tint them to a different color (Holidays usually) to fit the mood. Then have 1 in the bedroom.

There is also Tuya Cloud Cutter which I got to work with one bulb to permanently decouple a bulb from Tuya’s servers, it provided a new key. I ended up bricking it after by getting brave and flashing Tasmota to it (no longer powered up). So, I took that as a loss. Eventually, I will decouple the rest to make it more cloud free. I will say that in order to properly get the keys, you will need to download the Tuya App from your app store, factory reset the bulbs, then pair them with the app. The app will complain about some device issues, but those are safe to ignore, once they are connected to your Tuya Cloud, then you can harvest the local key.

With Linux, you need to have the awareness of what is running on your phone 24/7 and AFAIK, there’s nothing like that except maybe Home Assistant, but that’s pushing it. I have a buddy which has an always on VPN which he uses 100% of the time at home, never any issues with him. As for the phone, I have Wireguard for when I am not connected to my WiFi, and then disconnect when I’m back on my WiFi network. This way, I am certain to be on my home network 99.99% of the time. I use Tasker for that.

With that said, you will need an automation of sorts on the Android to be 100% sure you are on your appropriate VPN. Whether through Tasker, Macrodroid or a few other apps.

If you have Tasker, you can do that. Not sure if you are using Wireguard, but that makes it simpler to integrate IMHO with it. With it, you set a condition basically if App XYZ is open then use VPN ABC Otherwise, If app XYZ is not open, then use BCA VPN.

I admit I didn’t read many replies due to time. But to add to them, the more I deal with my mother who is becoming more technologically challenged in her years, I constantly get to hear about how confusing her Android is sometimes, I sort of wish she’d switch to Apple for it’s simplicity! I used to have an iMac and was gladly part of the eco-system for a while and enjoyed how intuitive it was. With that said, when the time came for me to join the Smartphone world in '10 or so - I went Android and haven’t looked back.

We’ve looked at them in the past and while they make solid quality phones and easy to use phones, from what I understand, the battery life is somewhat to be desired? (as of a few years ago). The formula they use to make everything stay within their Eco-system seems to be working for them. After all, if you have an iPhone, then it seamlessly works with your Mac, or other Apple Devices. There’s more control over it.

For the best flexibility with our family, we use Android and will for the time being. Not to say though that the newer Linux based phones (PinePhone,Librephone etc) aren’t catching my attention because they are and I’m a die hard Linux user! :)

I’ve tried this a few times, so I know I’ve added more hits to your counters! I know it can be run on non-pi devices which is cool, ever think of changing the name to suggest it’s not just for the 'ol pi? :)

Let me preface this with that I am an experienced CLI user and with Docker, so this really is not in my interest generally, but getting older and dealing with a variety of other personal issues, having a nice dashboard to deploy things sometimes is just really nice ya know? So I figured I would put on my dusty beginner’s hat to get this a run.

For the beginner, it’s a nice system to get started and get your feet wet with a no-nonsense app install experience. I tested this in a VM on my desktop and installed Sonarr and Sabnzbd which if you use Docker with these, you know the proper volume mapping is key. They take the hassle out of doing this for the end user. With that said though - file permissions are a bit off and both Sonarr and Sabnzbd needed the proper permissions set for the folders. Not a deal breaker for someone accustomed to the CLI, but for a new self hoster, this can be a bit frustrating.

Their app store is pretty impressive and I guess growing, the install on the server was painless to get running. It’s something to keep an eye on, it’s in good company with the other ones like Umbel and CasaOS, each has their own qualities.

For those wanting more fine grained control over the apps and installs, Tipi is a bit more opinionated to the port numbers and paths used and you can’t easily modify those (at least from what I could tell). In the long run, this is a non issue for the most part if you are starting on a freshly installed server and don’t want to handle the challenges of proper path mapping, reverse proxying and so forth. (They include Traefik in the install). Not having to worry if port 3000 is already taken or 8080 is, you can trust that it will handle it and it does!

I’ll admit, I’m not a huge fan of Traefik (It’s too big of a hassle for me and I use Cloudflare tunnels anyway). I couldn’t get past the login even after literally copy pasta of your example for the user test as a last resort. So, I’m not sure if it’s because I’m not using Traefik or some other reason. (Username tried was test Password Test) I also tried at first my username/password combo I set for it using the command to generate the passwd file.

Your page links 404 out, but if you reduce it to https://klay.gay/self-host/ it works and shows v.0.9.2 so you may want to edit your post. :)

I use Purelymail for mine. I have Uptime Kuma integrated with it using the SMTP server and also have different things like my password vault connected through it. It’s generally lightning fast and budget friendly too.

Everyone’s comments here made me realize just how bad it is still with employers trying to get warm bodies in the office. My company used to be “Everyone who works from home wastes time and is less productive” They quickly realized when their hands were forced and the pandemic hit, there were much less sick days, and productivity has never been higher!