I’m going to echo the zigbee recommendation for bulbs. Can be had for dirt cheap and work reliably (and there’s high end options too if you want that). And are fully locally provisioned and controlled.
Matter over thread is also becoming an option but the default provision option requires Google (including play services and an account) and they tend to be quite a bit more expensive.
Not FOSS or open source in any sense. You could still say it’s self-hosted, but I suspect most people self-hosting care about this.
Snikket is essentially just prosody but more of an all in one package.
Endurain, a self hosted fitness app, may get gadgetbridge integration once the network helper is finished.
This one is nicer than uptime-kuma if you prefer declarative config.
Probably need a bit more detail for this like caddy logs and your caddy config. I did a similar thing on NixOS with services.acme getting the certs and then configuring the cert files to include caddy group access (I didn’t use caddy directly either for those reading as the DNS challenge approach requires third party plugins which is a bit annoying on NixOS).
Sunshine and moonlight. Or just ssh if it’s for administrative tasks.
It looks similar to tailscale and netbird, in that it offers NAT traversal, relays, and proper authentication and access control. Whether or not you need that depends on your circumstances (how many users and their technical proficiency, CG-NAT prevalence, whether you need mesh support, etc).
If you’re just hosting for yourself and you have public ipv4 and ipv6 there’s not much benefit.
Some will let you pay for up to 10 years at the 1 year price, so if you get a deal on a particular tld (as long as it’s not an abused one like .xyz) you can pay upfront and save a decent amount of money.
From memory you should try and avoid 10 year renewals since you can’t transfer to a new registrar for the first year of the new renewal.
You’ll probably want WHOIS privacy support, so make sure the tld supports it.
I didn’t follow a guide, but this guide is probably the closest to how I’d do things.
I’d say if you don’t care that much about the data then either snapraid or RAID-5 is okay; I use snapraid because even if the data is replaceable, I’d prefer to lose only 1 or 2 drives instead of all of them. You should of course have proper 3-2-1 backups for essential/irreplaceable data in any case.
Because modern arrays are often in the multi-TB size recovery can take a significant amount of time (days and weeks potentially) and since RAID-5 only allows one drive to fail, if a second drive fails during that time you’re cooked.
I like to use snapraid combined with mergerfs which technically has the same problem, but because it works on the file level, if a second drive became corrupted, you’d only lose the data on the drive that failed, not the entire array. I combine it with snapraid-btrfs which operates on read-only snapshots instead of raw data, avoiding write hole issues (data changing during sync) and also btrfs itself on each drive gives an additional layer of integrity checking, and rollback support from the snapshots themselves.
It tends to be AMD GPUs that have the greatest differences in favour of Linux (except for ray tracing but that is improving in recent driver releases).
Paperless may work for this, although it’s more focused on document scanning.
Vaultwarden is probably a better fit for password management, combined with Bitwarden app and browser extensions.
Garmin smartwatch but used offline only and connected with the FOSS gadgetbridge software. I’ve also started doing some manual tracking in a diary just to get my thoughts down with it.
I would expect that the security issues are with the stock OS, but can’t argue with the gl.inet recommendation.
Also unrelated, but if you’re running a x86 system with gigabytes of RAM, why not run Opnsense at that point?
I believe it’s gotten better but historically *BSD had poor SQM support (bufferbloat mitigation), which is particularly useful on slower, asymmetric connections and where low, consistent latency is paramount.
It was also a bit of a laggard on Wireguard support, although that’s long since been fixed. So mainly you might prefer OpenWRT if you want the Linux kernel which tends to get features more quickly. Also because it’s so low on resource usage (including disk space), you can put it in a VM and very rapidly recover in the case of issues.
You could of course also use a full Linux based router OS, but I don’t believe there are many with a web interface, which most users would prefer.
This thread is helpful for Lenovo minipcs specifically: https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/lenovo-thinkcentre-thinkstation-tiny-project-tinyminimicro-reference-thread.34925/
Another approach would be setting up your own recursive revolver with e.g. Unbound. It’s debatable whether it’s more or less private than using DoH etc but it would bypass the DNS tampering by your ISP at the least.
You could also get a wildcard cert using dns challenge, and not even expose the subdomains publically.
The main benefit of Matter is that it is split into two layers (Matter and Thread) where as Zigbee is essentially one layer that handles everything. This makes Matter more flexible, since it can work over both Wifi and Thread (and any future protocol at the same layer). At the moment there isn’t a huge advantage, but in the future if the standard succeeds, you would hopefully be able to buy most smart devices and use just one protocol (Matter) to control and integrate them.
At the moment, the main advantage I can see is that more wifi smart devices can be locally controlled because they have Matter support (which requires it). Which historically, was limited to HomeKit over WiFi, ESPHome/Tasmota flashed devices, and sometimes through Home Assistant integrations that found a way to locally control devices for a given company.
Because I didn’t really explain Thread, I’ll just quickly say that it’s a protocol much like WiFi and the “closer to the hardware” part of ZigBee. I’d prefer buying Matter over Thread vs Matter over WiFi devices, particularly if you’re planning to build out a Thread mesh network (the Matter over wifi devices won’t help in that).