alt Hacker News> home lab
Well that's your problem right there. The home labber setups are for experimentation or "hot rodding" purposes and they typically way overbuild their solutions.
What most people need is an old desktop in a corner somewhere (preferably close to your router so you can get to it with an ethernet cable).
It's won't be Grandma proof, but if you're remotely technical you can write a docker compose file that glues together some useful home server utilities that sound interesting to you.
My setup is roughly speaking: Ubuntu LTS, ZFS (with 4 disks in a RAID10 style config), and a docker compose file that runs plex, transmission, syncthing, vaultwarden behind an nginx-proxy[1] container that even automagically renews my Let's Encrypt certs for me (though it's probably even easier if you use a Cloudflare tunnel).
If you're confident all your apps are available on these platforms, the storage part is easier with something like TruNAS or Unraid. If you don't need storage at all you can slim down your hardware a lot and just use a raspberry pi.
IMO, just find an old beater machine and get hacking :)
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What makes it grandma proof is software that makes it extremely simple, which is like a home appliance, which is within the realm of possibility.
The simpler way to go on most fronts is some form of Proxmox with things like the above managed, it takes care of much of the overhead and doubt on it's own or through a reasonably point and click interface, which could be pre-configured.
I moved my DO server to a pi that was gathering dust. I agree, folks need to get off the cloud, find an old laptop or an old $40 mac mini, they are usually low power enough.