Dyed in the wool Penguinista here, running Debian on most of my stuff. (Some smaller Raspberry Pis and a Pi CM4 desktop run R-Pi OS.) My home server runs off an

Dyed in the wool Penguinista here, running Debian on most of my stuff. (Some smaller Raspberry Pis and a Pi CM4 desktop run R-Pi OS.) My home server runs off an old Supermicro board with 16GB ECC RAM and which predates UEFI. It cost me about $100US used. It recently boots from 2 500GB SSDs in ZFS mirror. (Previously from a pair of old 500GB laptop HDDs.) I used to use rsync to backup but now my laptop and desktop are also on ZFS so I use ZFS (sanoid/syncoid) for backing up. In addition to serving files, I run Gitea on the server (in a Docker container) and a few other odds and ends to support Home Assistant. It backs up to a remote server (Dell R420, free from where my son works) at my son's house. Home assistant is now running on a headless Pi CM4 having recently migrated from a Pi 3B+. It ran fine on the 3B+ except when memory demand was high, being constrained by the 1GB RAM. The CM4 has 2GB RAM. I have a Pi 4B with 4GB RAM and a pair of 6TB HDDs in a USB dock (which also provides power for the 4B) and which also runs Gitea in Docker. It's sort of experimental but has been pretty solid. One of my uses for the servers is to host a MkDocs site where I keep all of my notes. This is served by a very simple "python -m http" and meets my needs. MkDocs lets me format my notes using Markdown which is very convenient. None of this is available to the Internet. All local due to security concerns. I have a separate VLAN for IoT devices, mostly Raspberry Pis and some smart bulbs and outlets. They don't get access to my primary LAN. VLAN and firewall are supported by a very small PC (Zotac - like a NUC) running pfSense. HTH. If you have any questions, go ahead and ask and I'll eventually get back to you.