Relay for Reddit app stays as one of the few remaining third party apps for Reddit and they are forced to go to a subscription model but the cost of such a subscription is related to how many API calls per user are done.
This screenshot was taken from the yet working patched Sync for Reddit app.
If you only want to run pihole or adguard home for ads then just buy a used Pi3 on eBay for $15-$30 and follow the instructions on pi-hole.net
But if you want to get into selfhosting other things, and it’s highly likely you will go down that rabbit hole, it’s addictive, then I would recommend starting with a used ThinkCentre M93p from eBay for $80-$120. Install OpenMediaVault on it, get your feet wet setting up a few services with docker. Some of the more popular services selfhosters run are: pihole, airsonic, nextcloud, paperless-ngx, immich, sonarr, lidarr… I could go on, but I don’t want to overwhelm you. If you are interested in the other things, take a look at this extensive list of selfhostable services, and sub to the selfhosting sublems. The selfhosting communities are pretty active and friendly here on Lemmy.
Id suggest Proxmox as a great starter, some amazing scripts out there, supports some GPUs passed through to containers and VMs with tweaks
Why do you say that? I’m interested in your opinion because I disagree. To be clear, I think proxmox is great, I just don’t feel it’s for the beginner.
My take on proxmox is that it’s great if you have actual server grade hardware that can handle multiple VMs and/or you want to do clustering. Neither of which I feel, a beginner would be attempting. I don’t even consider it for myself as I run on two SFFs PCs and I would see no benefit setting up proxmox > OMV instead of just installing OMV directly on them. Now if at some point I add more SFF PCS and want to cluster them or alternatively decide that I want to get rid of having multiple SFF PCs and run one singular, more powerful server, then I would see a benefit from proxmox… but not as it stands.
My take on the various options are this:
Tipi, Umbrel, CasaOS, YunoHost - Meant for average users that don’t want to spend any time on setup. Very easy to use, but also extremely limited walled gardens.
UnRaid - Much less limited then the above, but does force use of their UI often and in many cases is less efficient and frustrating if not downright incapable of accomplishing certain things. Meant for beginners that rely on UI.
OpenMediaVault - Basically Debian with an webadmin panel and the most common server services ready to install pre-configured with the most common + secure settings. So for beginners they can use the UI to setup shares and schedule jobs and containers and anything else really, but if they want to learn how to do things in the terminal then it doesn’t get in the way; I like that it gives you the freedom to do anything you want with it.
TrueNAS Scale - Great option if scaling out with additional hardware and your main concern is data storage. But I feel that unless you’re a member of datahoarder and have larger drive pools, this isn’t the best choice either. It does sometimes lock you into the GUI too, at least when I tried it earlier in their releases. Maybe that has changed now, but they wanted to force the UI with a lot of docker container setup which I found annoying.
So given this, I recommend OpenMediaVault to most selfhosters, beginners and more advanced users alike, as it gives the most freedom aside from configuring everything yourself on something like Ubuntu Server/openSuse/Debian/(pick your favorite flavor). I think Proxmox is great for the applications I mentioned initially (VMs on performant hardware, or clustering of multiple machines), but I just don’t see any benefit of it for a beginner nor if you are only going to have one or two lower powered machine like SBCs or SFF PCs.
But like I said, I’m interested in your opinion on why you would recommend it to a beginner. Or how you feel about my takes on these options.
Proxmox Helper Scripts are an easy way to get a homelab setup, I’ve found its as complex as you want it to be:
https://tteck.github.io/Proxmox/
Easy to make a ZFS pool and share that to a container / VM. Pass-through a GPU to a VM / Container for transcoding. Plenty of tutorials online for these features.
I’m running some old hardware on my setup currently, 64gb ddr4 x99 platform with no issues and planning on moving to a more recent Intel consumer platform.
OMV can be run in a VM / Container on proxmox, but I find that’s redundant for a single node when using ZFS.
I feel the small hump in initial configuration of proxmox is worth the payoff for long-term expandability.
Saying so my views may be skewed as I migrated from w10 pro to proxmox, I’ve delt with some issues (from my lack of understanding of the platform), had some complete rebuilds of containers and am still dealing with the pains of having upgraded to the unstable channel; trying to migrate back to the stable channel.
All proxmox aside I’m planning on moving everything over to nixos after having it installed on my desktop and laptop for a few weeks now.
I wouldn’t recommend inputting online scripts into bash to anyone without reading through it and understanding it firstly. It’s okay for you to make that risk assessment and decision for yourself, but I just couldn’t recommend it to another person. And I definitely would not want to condition a beginner into those kinds of habits.
In reference to beginners, I think the entire concept of proxmox and VMs and LXCs is a lot more to take in and understand than any of the other platforms that I mentioned using docker containers. It’s much easier to understand, this docker container provides this one applications/service instead of organizing and configuring LXCs to do different services. It is quite a lot more manual configuration (unless you are using the scripts you mentioned, which I would not recommend). You also have to manage your VMs and LXCs system resources, among other things that you don’t have to do in these other platforms using docker containers. It’s just a lot more to take in, for benefits that I don’t think most beginners are going to ever take advantage of. And many of those benefits can be seen with TrueNAS Scale in regards to using ZFS, expandability, etc. while not dealing with the aforementioned LXC/VM headaches. TrueNAS Scale, UnRaid, OMV are docker ready out of the box within a couple of clicks in the UI… and that’s how most home selfhosters are spinning up services. Think about what it takes to get docker ready in proxmox without those user helper scripts. Also in regards to hardware passthrough, docker can also do hardware passthrough with the
--deviceflag on any of these other platforms.I think proxmox is great as an overall management tool if you have server grade hardware or very powerful machines where you’ll be running multiple VMs or LXCs. But for beginners that just want to spin up some docker containers or selfhosters that are conscious about power consumption and want to purposely run lower power machines, than I still wouldn’t see myself recommending it.
Thank you very much for this info.