Ah hah! I went to write “Fedora”, and someone beat me to the punch! I find that you’ll get a lot of Bazzite, Silverblue, KDE Neon, Pop OS recommends, but I find that Mint and Fedor tend to work without too much fussing. I sometimes need to get rpmfusion or flathub stuff for Fedora to be 100% for me, but it really works quite wonderful after that. Mint is funny, because it’s the one everyone recommends for beginners, and, well, I keep coming back to it. It somehow manages to be more reliable than the Ubuntu base it’s built on.

I use phones without Sims, but it’s because I’m cheap and I have a collection of weird phones.

I run substreamer and tailscale to access my home navidrome. Works like a charm.

I have a docker compose immich that I somehow managed to kill fourteen minutes after convincing my wife to switch to it.

I’m a bit farther along, but it’s all been trial and error (and error, and error…) So, commenting because I would also like some of this info. My DNS is a disaster! Still using IPs to access my VMs, mostly.

Oh, I’ve done messes like this… I had a machine whose UEFI had like five things on it. This doesn’t solve it all, but I really like refind for taking care of whacky multi boot scenarios. Just install it and it scans all the drives in a system for OSes and gives you a menu on startup.
There are various VM solutions out there to handle running one-off windows programs, by the way. I have a copy of Win11 inside a Proxmox VM that runs those few times I need desktop Office for something specific. I’m sure others will come in with better solutions, but those are the ones I’ve used.

Back when I first started with NextCloud, it was pretty unresponsive on the web front end for my ebook collection, which was a ton of small files. It’s gotten a whole lot better in the last year or so. Now, I don’t worry about it. This is also with a very badly set up copy. I’m sure that a proper install would work much better, too.

I have a couple of friends with nextcloud, and I have nextcloud too. Low tech ish? But we just host our files on Nextcloud and then copy backups to the other machines every now and then.

My NC uses about 6gb of RAM, and it is really badly optimized, since it’s been running forever and isn’t a container, or even a server deploy. (It’s a snap running in desktop Ubuntu since 2016.)

Anyone could do better, I just can’t be bothered.

My buddy has his running on 1.5GB of RAM in a container.

I also host a bunch of other stuff. Navidrome and freshrss get the most use, other than Nextcloud. Immich, searx-ng, jellyfin, guacamole.