FairEmail is the Gold Standard right now imho. The learning curve can be quite steep though.

I always point people here: https://youtu.be/uPYjJYQEFSg

Hard to give you hints when we don’t know what your background is, so here is some basics:

For starting selfhosting I’d recommend getting comfortable with the linux command line at first (this may help: https://www.linuxcommand.org/). Set up a VM in Virt-manager / VirtualBox / VMWare / whatever hypervisor you want, install a Linux image (I’d recommend plain Debian without desktop environment). Now you have a sandbox where you can toy around. If you’re on windows you can use WSL2. If you’re already on a linux desktop, toy around there.

If you already got some hardware like a raspberry pi or old Laptop, get that up and running with a distro of your choice, plug it into your network and SSH into it, then you have got your playground there. Get the basic commands in like ls, pwd, cat, tail, touch, mkdir, rm, … And some things you can do with them. Check out their respective man-pages.

After that, install some packages, change configs (I’d recommend nano over vim for starters). From now on, there are no boundaries of what to do. Set up your first basic webserver with apache / nginx / caddy, install docker / podman and containerize / get some images, set up pihole, nextcloud, jellyfin, do whatever you like… Congratulations, you are now “self hosting”.

Maybe some day switch that Raspberry pi out for a thin client as seen in the picture from OP and install a hypervisor like Proxmox on it. If you got all that, which may take a while, you can consider networking and firewalls IMHO (you could get a cheap router that supports OpenWRT to learn about these things). Don’t open ports to the internet as long as you’re not 100% sure what you are doing. You can set up a VPN with DynDNS on most modems / routers connected to your ISP though, opening up your self hosted services only to you / anyone with access. Or use something like Tailscale / Twingate.

I could go on, but like I said, self hosting and home labbing is kind of use case / requirement specific.

Buy a used 1l mini PC like the Lenovo thinkcentre tiny (or similar Dell or HP models). You will have to spend a bit more, but you could get one with a pretty capable Intel CPU from gen 7 or 8 upwards for virtualization with Proxmox.

If you’re really just looking for a x86 SBC, get a Radxa with an Intel N100 or something similar. They sell at about your price limit with low specs on Aliexpress:

https://radxa.com/products/x/x4/

I like your style, but I guess both would get you into legal trouble.

I actually plan on putting hardware related stuff on an extra pi since I only run a single proxmox node right now. Would be home assistant and nut tools for the ups but I might put pihole and unbound on that as well.

I am worried about the performance though because of home assistant. And it is pretty comfortable to have everything on one host that is far from being used to capacity anyway.

I have a suspicion that this isn’t even about culture or revenue anymore. It’s about control.

I have the same setup, you have to add the line Environment="HSA_OVERRIDE_GFX_VERSION=10.3.0" for that specific GPU to the ollama.service file

I am on Fedora as well and have used the microsoft wireless dongle with the medisalix/xone kernel module in the past, but i stopped using it since it had me pull and plug the dongle once every while to make it work again.

Nowadays i just use bluetooth (with my xbox one and xbox series x controller). You actually don’t need any additional packages for that. Three things to consider about this:

• You possibly have to upgrade the controller firmware with an atrocious app on a windows machine
• pairing is a nightmare (needed an hour for one controller always trying until the pairing completed)
• You need to set some bluetooth settings in a config file for Bluetooth LE timings since the microsoft team thought it would be funny to not let the controller advertise the right configurations.

All that said, once paired and configured it just works ™. Feel free to reach out if you need further information.

I used a raspberry pi 3 with RaspAP in this use case in my room at home for some time. Performance was not the best, but enough for my needs back then.