I'm surprised no-one has mentioned Unraid here yet (https://unraid.net https://unraid.net). You install it to a USB, put the USB into whatever you want as a se

I'm surprised no-one has mentioned Unraid here yet (https://unraid.net https://unraid.net). You install it to a USB, put the USB into whatever you want as a server, and boot it up from the USB. The OS and config gets loaded into a ram drive. You now have a linux server ready to go, with access to thousands of apps and add-ons (which are basically just open source things you already know on various docker containers). So you can install postgres, redis, whatever, and you are off to the races if you want to host your own side projects. Or you can install Tailscale, plex, and whatever OSS dropbox / media server clones to have access to your media anywhere. The magic is that it all 'just works' and has a nice web GUI to install and configure things, and you don't even need to know that Docker is handling all the things running under the hood if you don't want to. The only tricky bit can be mounting volumes from the various containers to get things working together, for which there are many many guides and youtube videos. You can always bring your own docker compose config if you you want to keep it in code. The uptime for one of my servers was up to well over half a year, and only storm & power outage brought the server down...now I've got it on a UPS with automated safe shutoff (again configured in the web GUI, took about 5-10 mins) if power drops again. Unraid just runs and is rock solid and stays out of your way for whatever things you want to run.