Hetzner storage boxes look really compelling. Thanks for sharing!

I just scroll past those. I have set my XDG dirs which helps. If I were to reinstall it would be back once I have everything I need

Who cares with storage nowadays? I just use filelight or command line based tools to determine big storage hogs when I need to

Cloudflare tunnels definitely aren’t wrong, you’re just not entirely using open source software. It’s a very good option if you need to open things to the public or want to learn more about cloud services

You can selfhosted tailscale so that they don’t have any access. You can’t with cloudflare tunnels as far as I know. Tailscale’s client is open source, so is their Headscale server which originally was developed by a 3rd party. You can look into the code for that. Not sure what you’d want me to say. If you really want to be informed I’d inspect the code yourself

Tailscale shouldn’t be getting your data anyway. It’s a mesh VPN that directly connects devices after their auth server gives out certs and let’s clients know where to find another. If you’re not comfortable with using their server for this I’d suggest you look into the open source headscale server. I do remember it routing through their server in the rare case NAT punching doesn’t work

Why are you attacking so many loud majorities at once? Not everyone that likes some of those hates systemd or belittles users for

In that case I would like to recommend you install Arch at least once. Not to actually use in production, but it made a lot of things click for me that help me with server stuff too. Just follow along with the install guide on the wiki inside of a VM.

If you really want to know what applications are essential I’d install a window manager and not just install the gnome package. Though even just installing your favourite DE will work fine.

I’ve heard other people recommend Gentoo and Linux from scratch as well for this purpose since they go even deeper, but that may be too much to start off with and I haven’t done that myself

It’s probably best to use an immutable distro like NixOs or Fedore SilverBlue when installing for people who don’t know Linux and don’t want to learn

Just see your systems as cattle, not pets. That way you can do this. Usually done through infrastructure as code like Ansible. NixOs is perfect for this use case

Personally I use tailscale which should punch through double NAT. It’s a wire guard based mesh VPN, but an exit node should make it a normal VPN

You can use headscale with tailscale if you want to self host it. Headscale is a community made server implementation for tailscale

I run wiki.js for documentation for my home lab, but also things like the custom rom setup for my phone. However it’s hard to keep it up to date as I forget it exists. I mostly use it to document setting up windows server core with different roles as I don’t need to do that often, but most tutorials on the web are SEO optimised with low quality

This video from thiojoe is probably relevant here. It is mostly for scam websites, but maybe it’s useful for this too? At least gives you some platforms to contact