Everything I hear about Nextcloud scares me away from messing with it.

I’m just running into this now. It also won’t let me log into the web interface. I’m glad I experimented with a second install before upgrading my primary pihole.

I tried Kopia but it was unstable and janky, so now it’s whenever I remember to manually run a bunch of rsync. I backup my desktop to cold storage on the first of the month, so I should get in the habit of backing up my server to the NAS then also.

Raspberry Pi 2 or 3 (can’t remember which) controlled through the TV with the remote. It’s running LibreElec (Kodi) with the Jellyfin plugin. Discoverability isn’t great through Kodi, but I can always use a computer or phone to find the media and cast if I need to.

Veilguard is a 3rd person action RPG, not a CRPG. It plays like God of War or something. It has lots of DA characters and lore, though.

I think the PC vs. console divide is relevant here. I’m not sure how advanced text entry on consoles is these days, but I imagine PCs have the advantage with keyboards. Maybe if they use voice recognition on the consoles? But AAA games usually target both, and if interacting with the model is clunky for a big chunk of your market then the big developers might not use the technology.
Of course, indie devs that only target PC can go wild.

I believe the issue is only with Tailscale Funnels. With Funnels, the data runs through TS’s infrastructure so it’s subject to whatever kind of bandwidth limitation they feel like enacting.

As others have said, you don’t need to know how to code, but you do need to be comfortable editing structured documents, so knowing a little programming does help.
Unfortunately, Nextcloud and email are two of the most difficult things to self-host. This is by reputation, I haven’t tried myself. Email is supposed to be particularly difficult and the usual advice is to not bother.
Jellyfin is pretty straight-forward as long as you don’t have a weird hardware decoding setup and as long as you don’t want remote access. If you do want remote access you need to use third party tools to do it securely. If it’s just for your own use then Tailscale makes it really easy. If you want to share with non-technical users it gets messy.

I went with Debian and I use Docker for containers. I considered Proxmox, but I didn’t end up trying it. PiHole is a good application for the Pi Zero (I have an early generation Pi dedicated to running PiHole), but you could also run it on the Beelink.

I strongly recommend you download Obsidian and keep hyperlinked notes on everything you do and links to every tutorial/resource you end up using.
Have a place to keep all the passwords your services will end up needing. A password manager is the best option. Make the password on your admin account on Debian (or whatever) easy to remember and enter, since you’ll need to sudo a lot.
If the Beelink comes with a copy of Windows installed, you can recover the key from within Linux with the following command:
sudo strings /sys/firmware/acpi/tables/MSDM
Then you have a spare Windows key should you ever need one.

Sears & Roebuck

AWS

According to my Synology:

Where are you finding this data? It’s not Info Center -> Storage…

I’ve got Pentiment and Persona 5 ready to go. I’ll probably start Pentiment first since it’s undoubtedly shorter.
Balatro looks really tempting, too, but I’d want that for my laptop or phone (?) and not my gaming PC.

I use Portainer mainly to start / stop / restart containers without the mental load of using the command line. It works fine with Compose if you can get (or write) a yaml file for the container you’re interested in, or you can use it to pull from the repository and set everything up if you can’t. Portainer also gives you a nice, one-stop view of the current state of your containers. Basically, it can’t hurt to have it around.
Personally, my favorite Docker management GUI is the one that comes with Synology NASes. It’s much less clunky that Portainer and iirc a little more powerful. But of course it only runs in their hardware.

I got a free copy with a graphics card I bought recently, but AAA games aren’t really my jam. OTOH, I would like to put the card through its paces… Chances are it will make me create yet another account somewhere to play it, so I probably won’t bother with it.

I loved Monster Train, and Slay the Spire has such a great reputation, but the art style is ass so I’ve been reluctant to pick it up (Monster Train’s is pretty bad too). This doesn’t look like much of an improvement, but perhaps gameplay trumps graphics again here.

Dwarf Fortress? Go hard or go home.

This version of Warcraft II has the map editor, right? I really enjoyed building my own tower defense scenarios.
I’ll pass otherwise.

Yeah, my main complaint with PoE 1 is the way it bludgeons you with lore. The writers are so excited to show off this massive world they’ve invented, they just aren’t very artful about it.

The tone is much less dour than the first one, and I think it does a better job introducing the world. It’s still a lot to take in, but all of the text has links you can click on that explain anything you don’t recognize.