2.5 years ago, I migrated all my services hosted on a cloud provider to a homeserver.
This homeserver is also my workstation/gaming/dev/everything. I use QubesOS (an operating system based on the Xen hypervisor), and wrote some document about it: https://neowutran.ovh/qubes/articles/homeserver.pdf
Basically, I am hosting:
- DNS
- Matrix
- Jitsi
- Mumble
- Peertube
- Screego
- Nextcloud
- Searxng
- Tor
- Wireguard VPN
- Copy of wikipedia
- Personal website And others.
And for TLS, to have better security, and to avoid relying on third party company/providers, I am using DANE.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS-based_Authentication_of_Named_Entities
https://sr.ht/~yukikoo/dane_without_root/
https://github.com/buffrr/letsdane
The “dane_without_root” is one of my projects and I am welcoming review / feedback on it
( I also posted about it on the QubesOS forum: https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/highlighting-neowutrans-technical-doc-about-qubes )
I tried QubesOS back in the day. How has it progressed as a desktop. I was always underwhelmed visually. It just seemed rather chunky. Maybe that is intentional.
Of course, if you are going for security, that’s great, but it seemed to me that security and a visually appealing desktop could be blended.
I haven’t know that time. It is indeed now way less chunky than your screenshot. By default it use XFCE, but support also KDE, i3 and other. Before starting to use QubesOS I was on arch with i3, and I kept using i3 on QubesOS