I use Signal for private and personal messages. I use Discord solely for gaming and voicechat. A good alternative doesn’t need to be overly private (although that would be a bonus of course). It just needs to have a good UI and feature parity with Discord.
I always buy from GOG if it’s available. But I use it for my own convenience and I don’t share it with others as that would be piracy.
My point is that as soon as everyone around you finds it cheaper and more convenient to use your “service”, game developers will double down on their DRM efforts.
That’s why you can never have nice things in this wold. Some people will always abuse it.
This goes agaist everything de-DRM. This is basically piracy if you share it with friends and family. DRM sucks. But this will make DRM even more important. Projecs like this will kill every de-DRM movement.
KitchenOwl and Pastes are probably the easiest to setup. Paperless is the most useful for me. Nextcloud can be a bitch to setup once you want to include Office functionality. I recommend the Nextcloud All-In-One to make it a bit easier.
In addition to the ones listed above, I can also recommend Home Assistant if you don’t know it yet. If you like home automation you’re in for a treat.
No worries. Enjoy!
Hosting Bookstack seems a bit much for someone who’s just getting started.
The easiest way to get started is using Docker. You can self-host most software using Docker straight from their Github with one command or copy-paste config.
Do NOT expose (Port forward/NAT) your services to the internet if you don’t know what you’re doing. Use it locally using IP:port. If you want to use your services remotely, use a VPN tunnel like Wireguard (Available on Android and iOS too). Modern routers already support it out of the box. Tailscale is also an option.
Later down the road when you start exposing services, I can recommend NPM as your proxy for easy host and certificate management. Expose as little as possible! For added security when exposing applications to the internet, expose your port using a VPS or Cloudflare and tunnel to your home using Tailscale or Wireguard.
To not get overwhelmed you should start small and improve as you go. You don’t need to start with a datacenter in your garage right away. The most important thing is that you have fun along the way :)
Great projects to get started:
That’s what I said. It’s pretty involved. And their Discord is extremely toxic. The most toxic Discord I have ever seen from a FOSS project. But when you get it up and running, it’s great. Just pray nothing breaks.
I used all three tools. Pufferpanel was by far the easiest to setup. But it’s mostly limited to Minecraft servers.
If you’re familiar with Docker and want something with UI for easy management of configs, plugins and server console, you might like Pterodactyl Panel, Pelican Panel or Pufferpanel. The easiest one to setup is Pufferpanel. Pterodactyl is more involved but you’re flexible to host other game servers too if you want to.
Nothing new here. I’d recommend checking out PrivacyGuides instead for a more comprehensive and informative list…
You save some money by buying recertified drives from Serverpartdeals.
I found Mealie to be a bit bloated and not fitting my needs too well. I moved to KitchenOwl. Small project but I love it.
They use the hardware acceleration not only for transcoding and encoding but also for the AI models afaik. It’s great!
I use a an Inteln Arc card for transcoding. Mainly because I also use Immich and transcode movies too. It’s great.
I most of my parts from Ebay second hand, including the CPU.
I understand the purpose of open-source. I can voice my opinion and say the software isn’t good in some ways. The developer should be able to handle criticism.
TrueNas Scale was mentioned here several times. If you want something more easy like Synology but just as flexible, you could give HexOS a try. It’s still very early in development but has the main features. It’s running on top of TrueNas so you can always use the more complicated settings when you need to.
Why are there official clients then? Better not to provide any client at all than bad clients based on the web UI.
i5 9th gen. 8 Seagate Ironwolf in a RaidZ2. 64GB ECC Ram. Software: TrueNAS.
I’m also trying to figure out a setup using Docker. What’s the recommended way of connecting the container to a VPN? Ideally I want to bind the qbittorrent container to a VPN while the rest of the machine is not connected to the VPN.