It depends what your long term goals are. If it’s just to run those services as simply as possible, then just run them in docker on windows. If you want to learn Linux, then setup you other hardware and install a server distro. Ubuntu is fine, but I use Debian.

Then once you get used to Linux, one day you could migrate your Plex server to Linux and remove windows from your main server.

It depends what you mean by nice and how complex it is? I built my own site which is basically my front end access to all the services I host. I wrote it extremely basically in html and got just the very basic context of what I wanted setup. Then I put the whole thing into Claude, and asked it to tidy it up. Then I started a new Claude session and put the whole thing in again and asked it to modernise it. Then did the same again but asked it to improve it. After about 5 or 6 run thoughts, I was happy with it. But it only has 2 pages, the first main page for anybody, and the 2nd admin page password protected just for me.

I don’t think the issue is listening to music, but installing potentially dodgy software that could bring a virus into the corporate network. Hence most businesses handling sensitive information try to protect their systems and networks by preventing unauthorised installation of software.

🤮 I hate gui config! Way too much hassle. Give me cli and a config file anyday! I love being able to just ssh into my server anytime from anywhere and fix, modify or install and setup something.

The key to not being overwhelmed is manageable deployment. Only setup one service at a time, get it working, safe and reliable before switching to actually using full time, then once certain it’s solid, implement the next tool or deployment.

My servers have almost no breakages or issues. They run 24/7/365 and are solid and reliable. Only time anything breaks is either an update or new service deployment, but they are just user error by me and not the servers fault.

Although I don’t work in IT so maybe the small bits of maintenance I actually do feel less to me?

I have 26 containers running, plus a fair few bare metal services. Plus I do a bit of software dev as a hobby.

I have currently got 23 on my n97 mini pc and 3 on my raspberry pi 4, making 26 in total.

I have no issues managing these. I use docker compose for everything and have about 10 compose.yml files for the 23 containers.