Seefoo

HA integrated with homekit well. I like to tinker, but hate doing interface/dashboard work. I did find an auto dashboard for HA which has made our lives easier. My long term hope is to use a voice assisstant for the rest.

Since it sounds like youre handy already, i would really dig into the dashboard side since that will dictate how easy it is for your family to use.

Komodo handles this better. I dont use it, but i did spend a week trying it out. You can add repositories and run builds on them then use those in a stack

I find LLMs make a lot more.mistakes when they try to distill a guide down to steps. Its not a bad summary, but they to get confused sometimes when there are forks in the guide. That said they are really good at finding guides, especially older ones that SEs tend to not place as high

I think your best bet is to pick one thing that you can get a good guide for and start from there. If you really want to learn its probably better to start with a Debian or arch setup than proxmox, but that's really going to depend on what you really care about learning.

I know it will be an unpopular opinion but you can use perplexity or Claude to help you find useful sources online if you're striking out on your searching. Most of the time I find they do better with more obscure issues, but those should be rare if you're following a guide

I tried out Komodo, but gave up on it. I looked at dockge after, but opted not to try it out. I prefer the IaaC setup with my compose in a repo for versioning and rollback. And while I think you can probably combine the two, komodo was getting in the way most of the time. It centered around secrets management and generating those secrets at run time.

That said, I feel like if I expand beyond a single server I may go back to one of these tools

I use wireguard directly instead of tailscale. Not sure what router you're using, but mikrotik support it out of the box. I am sure they are not the only ones. My phone runs on it 24/7 and has access to the rest of my services.

I haven't setup nextcloud, so can't give any advice on that. Immich was insanely easy to setup though.

I like navidrome, but I am not using jellyfin, so I have nothing to compare it with.

Fair point actually.

only real sane comment here really. DSA voted not to endorse. https://www.cityandstateny.com/politics/2025/11/chi-osse-congress/409723/

Sure supply chain attacks are a thing, but containers aren't the issue. Any package delivery mechanism can suffer from it. Its up to you to verify those containers and/or build it yourself

This is the correct answer. There are some occasional docker containers you can use that connect to your VPN for the service you plan to use

This is how Berkshire has invested over the years. They try to time it, and buy the recession basically. When you're investing long term, you can either hold and ignore or sell early, losing a bit and buy again after the drop

This has to be trolling. Or perhaps uninformed? There are a lot of people being detained based on profiling. Yes ones who are citizens and many straight up born here.

That said, I do think OP can get out some. But being cautious is not a bad idea in this environment.