VPN is the way to go if you’re not sharing it with a bunch of people

Thanks, I’ll have a look!

I currently have some notes in Nextcloud notes which I quite like. I don’t need anything too fancy. Markdown is nice to have, but not required if there is some ui way to make checkboxes. If I remember correctly, in the nextcloud notes app you have to set the folder that it uses. Which makes shared notes impractical, if not impossible.

Because of this, I still have several notes shared with my wife in Google keep for things like shopping lists. I’m tempted to test out the shopping list function in home assistant, but not sure if it will fit the needs. Would be nice to find something that covers all my use cases in one app.

KDE Connect as another uas suggested.

Only buggy issue I have is that I use a VPN on my phone to access my local network when away from home. I have the VPN set up with Hairpinning so I don’t have to disconnect from the VPN while at home which occasionally causes issues on my steam deck as the version of KDE Connect on the steam deck does not appear to have an easy way to connect to device via IP. On my desktop and laptop I run Pop!_OS and use GS Connect which gives me an option to connect to device via IP so I have less issues with my phone just randomly not appearing on those computers.

Back in the day I ran a pfsense VM on ESXi before broadcom bought them. I found it easier to just purchase a cheap Unifi AP and spin up a VM for the Unifi controller app (I’m assuming you can still run that on your own hardware, its been a few years). I think I got a UAP 6 lite or something like that. If I recall it was about $130 CAD with the PoE injector.

Techincally its not ideal to run your firewall on the same device as other things, but I never had any issues.

Also, does the mini PC have multiple NICs? You will have a bad time if it does not.

Personally I’d say if you’re coming from a Mac, go Pop!_OS. If you’re coming from Windows, go Linux mint. Both have the option to run from a USB to test before installing.

I’m using a Jellyfin server with Symonium on android. It’s almost as good as plexamp, but sadly not available on other platforms. Symfonium will work with any media player that uses subsonic. My current jellyfin implementation is http with a VPN for external use.

Plus one for the gli.net router. I’ve got the Beryl AX and it’s great. Ended up going with a wireguard VPN rather than tailscale, but either would work.