Great advice. I found an old laptop and I’m putting it through the paces now, and I’m really surprised at how easy all of this is. Setting up my own Invidious instance took minutes. Immich is where I’ll need to plateau out, I expect. My partner will immediately fill up the laptop by dumping her phone onto it, so that will need to wait for a long-term solution. That being said, a Lenovo mini whatever seems like a solid standard.

Oh, I can deal with something that’s larger…

-wait, not like that.

Thanks for this, this sounds like where I’m headed. I just hadn’t even considered thin clients/mini PCs, and it sounds like a lot of people are using Lenovos for this exact thing. I’m not at the point yet of doing something big, just small home lab, but I would like to get to the point of hosting immich for the family, and maybe having an LLM or SD in there at some point. But by then I’m hoping the RAMpocalypse is easing up. For now, it’s just privacy front ends until I know what I’m doing.

Thanks - I’ve put it off for a while, and didn’t realize how easy this all was to set up!

Thanks- I found an old laptop to give things a test run. I’ll do some thin client shopping once I cut my teeth a bit.

Yeah, I was looking earlier, and sort of didn’t know what to even look for, but then everyone here made suggestions of what to look for. I’m all over this!

Thanks!

Yep, I forgot we have an older MBP that can still manage minimums for Docker. Already had redlib up on it.

Thanks - I think a NUC/thin client will be how I end up going. I just didn’t even think about them in terms of meeting the criteria of “small thing I can leave running and not care about.” I think I still have an old laptop my partner used to use that would work, which might be my tester.

Will do, thanks!

Thanks - I’ll check them out.

Awesome idea, thanks! I want something that can spend 99% of the time just hiding behind other consoles, and this would work perfectly for that.

Personally, I shuffle photos from my phone to my laptop and then backup manually, which is not awesome. Having my own cloud-based backups for that would be great. Might even get my partner to go for it, which is the hard sell.

Yeah, that’s my fallback idea. I would sort of prefer the ease of a single board option I can just shove behind the router, but this might be easier.