Greetings, so I final got wife permission to buy a pi zero 2 and a beeline 12s pro (n100) arriving tomorrow. I already have a nas drive for my media.
Question is what is the average setup and guides for this?
Of course I will be scouring this and other communities for info but the immediate items I want to fix are my plex/jellyfin server, setup RetroArch or equivalent gaming, then of course arr servers. But I would like to also get into reverse proxy and searxng, next cloud and pihole.
Any tips on how to make this beautiful?
OS recommendations? I currently run manjaro on my daily, but would think a kubuntu or kde fedora/debian spin might be better for these items.
Guides you can point me to? Suggestions for more or better options? There are plenty of answers in this community and I will look at what’s posted but any assistance is appreciated.
Thank you in advance.
I’m excited to start plying with the simple things
Out of recommendations given here I’d ignore Arch/Manjaro, for a server you want something that you can set up and forget about and not explode when you try to update the packages after not doing so for 3 months.
Kubernetes and the likes are a bit of an overkill unless you’re planning to expand to having multiple machines or want a learning experience.
I’d recommend docker compose or podman, you generally don’t want bare bones docker as running your containers via
docker runsucks ass.IMHO Arch is actually a great choice. They do have a minimum update frequency you need to maintain (I don’t recall exactly, I think it is somewhere between 1 and 3 months) but if you do, and read the news before updates (and you are usually fine if you don’t, usually the update will just refuse to run until you intervene) things are pretty seamless. I had many arch machines running for >5 years with no issues and no reason to expect that it would change. This is many major version updates for other distros which are often not as seamless.
That being said I am on NixOS now which takes this to the next level, I am running nixos-unstable but thanks to the way NixOS is structured I don’t need to worry about any legacy cruft accumulating from the many years of updates.
And after all of that I don’t think it really matters. I think any major distro you pick, weather stable, release-based or LTS will be fine. They all have some sort of update path these days. (unlike in the past where some distros just recommended a re-install for major updates).
I think it’s probably down to preference. I personally really like Fedora server because it comes pre-installed with the Cockpit webui which replaces the role of Portainer and makes other admin tasks like firewall openings and user management trivial. I’m definetly glad to have switched away from Ubuntu server which I was using before.