I use portainer extensively and am quite fond of it. I normally live on the CLI so picking a GUI tool over cli management is unusual for me but I’ve found portainer largely just makes typical management easier and doesn’t get in my way at all.

For your other questions I have no answers. I self host everything so to me “what is worth running” is not a question that makes sense. I run what I need and my needs therefore define what I run.

I stick to IRC over matrix.

500Mbps isn’t a measurement of electrical consumption

To each their own but I think I prefer to stick to Nextcloud and just continue to keep things organized the old fashioned way for the most part.

Though for documents those all get fed to paperless-ngx

Don’t sleep on the Teamspeak 6 beta. It is very close to being a total discord replacement and in its current form is still extremely usable.

Check out the Teamspeak 6 beta. I’ve checked out probably all the most popular discord alternatives at this point (as I refuse to use it and am always looking for something to convince others to get off of it) and the TS6 beta is almost right there as far as core features and experience goes.

That sounds fine. I would only say don’t use Syncthing to actually make your backups. My preference and recommendation is restic, possibly combined with the helper utility autorestic.

Lidarr isn’t really meant for that so you’re always going to fighting things I unfortunately

NPM likes to eat the let encrypt requests which is what I’m assuming is breaking the cert gen inside the container. I believe you can work around this, but honestly I’d recommend just moving to a more advanced but more flexibile proxy solution.

Personally I recommend Traefik. There isn’t a friendly gui to help you but once you wrap your head around it things just work. It also allows for defining proxy parameters right in your compose file via labels so it takes out the need to log into NPM and manage proxy entries there. Just deploy you’re compose fils and you’re off.

As far as making what you’ve got just work, you can either try to get NPM to stop intercepting the LE cert requests or hack up the signal-tls-relay container and jam the NPM certs into it. I wouldn’t recommend either of these options though. I’ve been in a similar scenario and it’s this among other reasons why I moved off NPM. I started with NPM because I thought it would be simple and easy and it is, right up until you want to do a thing even slightly outside of its fairly limited box.

And as someone who uses Linux for literally everything I know better than to preach as if Linux is a full replacement for Windows. It’s not and there are absolutely reasons to still use windows. OP isn’t asking about the OS and given the nature of the question probably isn’t ready for such a switch in the first place.

Can you build it yourself for cheaper?

Also, IMO 16GB is bare minimum in 2026 if you are using Windows. I’d really go to 32GB.

Not yet but I plan to. Just haven’t gotten around to setting it all up yet.

Instead of 8080:8080 port mapping you do 127.0.0.1:8080:8080

To my knowledge there is no such thing available however you have just enlightened me about TS6’s featureset. It sounds like it is the exact solution you are asking for (and one I’m going to immediately try out myself.)

So you’re going to start backing it up immediately then right? Right?!?!?

I don’t pay any mind to example compose files. My are all quite custom anyway. Only thing that matters is paying attention to changelogs and watching for breaking changes.

It’s a learning exercise

Then crack open the documentation and learn how to actually write and use ansible

Do you have problems with videos if you don’t use the proxy?

Thanks for the followup. This one is actually exactly what I was think about building. I just stood it up and it works perfectly.

You’re requirements are too vague as “lots of apps/VMs” doesn’t describe the expected load. Overall though if you want small just build a mini-ITX system. Then you can put in any x86 chip that fits your needs.

Can’t say I’ve run into a need for such consideration yet. Excluding stacks explicitly meant to work together to some degree most of my services are an island to themselves and I like it that way. Then as far as notifications are concerned pretty much every supports at least email or ntfy.sh.