Everything works except Thunderbolt/USB4 and Video output via USB-C

I wouldn’t use it as a NAS if you plan to use NVMe SSDs for fast storage (since you can’t connect them via USB4), but if you only plan on using SATA SSDs or mechanical drives, USB 3 should be fine. Other than that, everything you would need in a server is there and works flawlessly.

You can install Linux on ARM-based Macs too:
https://asahilinux.org/
!asahilinux@lemmy.world

Are people sending $5 every now and then

That’s still better than nothing I guess

You can actually unlock LUKS from another machine over SSH: https://www.cyberciti.biz/security/how-to-unlock-luks-using-dropbear-ssh-keys-remotely-in-linux/

I’m pretty happy with this solution

You can use Roundcube for web mail

Just want to mention that TrueNAS is FOSS and unRAID is not. And I wouldn’t necessarily say that unRAID is much easier.

• Home Assistant
  There’s no fucking way I’m using a cloud service to control parts of my home, that just feels so wrong to me on so many levels

• Nextcloud
  There’s no way I’m saving my files on someone else’s computer (the Cloud). Even with encryption, it’s expensive. Hard drives are cheap. Put them in a server, install Nextcloud and you have your private, cheap, independent cloud service.

• Immich (currently migrating to Ente) for my photos

• Jellyfin + arr Stack
  I’m not paying $100/month for 5 different streaming services to have access to all the content I like.

• Navidrome for my (pirated) music

• Audiobookshelf for audiobooks and podcasts

• Pi-Hole with Unbound set up as a recursive resolver, cause why should I trust someone else with DNS?

I also self-host Matrix or Revolt servers as well as game servers for me and my friends, because it’s much cheaper than getting VPS or a hosted option, and I already have this server that I use for a bunch of other stuff, so I can also just use it for that.

I recommend building your own firewall. There are awesome, FOSS, FreeBSD-based firewall operating systems like pfSense and OPNSense. You can do a whole bunch of cool stuff with them, like block ads, scan incoming traffic for malware, monitor your network, collect data about your connections and visualize them in a nice dashboard and more.

It can even be self-hosted https://help.ente.io/self-hosting/

https://f-droid.org/packages/app.alextran.immich/

Both are great. Unraid makes things really easy with their Community Apps feature. On the technical side, I prefer TrueNAS Scale because it’s based on Debian, whereas Unraid is based on Slackware Linux. TrueNAS Scale is fully FOSS, whereas big parts of Unraid are proprietary. But there are more guides and tutorials for Unraid, as it seems to be the more popular option. If you’re going to install Unraid, definitely check out Spaceinvader One on YouTube, he’s got some awesome videos on the topic.

Unraid would be my first suggestion as well. But if you prefer something FOSS, check out TrueNAS Scale. (It is important that you go with TrueNAS Scale, not Core. TrueNAS Core is the continuation of the former FreeNAS, which is based on FreeBSD. Since it’s not a Linux system, it doesn’t support Docker. TrueNAS Scale is based on Debian Linux and much closer to Unraid, it has full support for KVM Virtualization and Docker containers.)