alt Hacker NewsOne of the most helpful realizations I had as I played around with self-hosting at home is that there is nothing magical about a NAS. You don't need special NAS software. You generally don't need wild filesystems, or containers or VMs or this-manager or that-webui. Most people just need Linux and NFS. Or Linux and SMB. And that's kind of it. The more layers running, the more that can fail.
Just like you don't really need the official Pi-hole software. It's a wrapper around dnsmasq, so you really just need dnsmasq.
A habit of boiling your application down to the most basic needs is going to let you run a lot more on your lab and do so a lot more reliably.
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Same with a router. Any Linux box with a couple of (decent) NICs is a powerful router. You just need to configure it.
But for my own sanity I prefer out of the box solutions for things like my router and NAS. Learning is great but sometimes you really just need something to work right now!
Kind of expanding on this, it feels like a huge chunk of specialized operating systems are just someone just putting their own skin over Debian. The vast majority of services and tools they wrap aren't any more complicated than the wrapper.
Hardware is kind of the same deal; you can buy weird specialty "NAS hardware" but it doesn't do well with anything offbeat, or you can buy some Supermicro or Dell kit that's used and get the freedom to pick the right hardware for the job, like an actual SAS controller.