Every single time I talk to my friends, whom also want an *arr/Plex/VPN/Home Assistant setup like I’ve got, I can see the fear in their eyes when I mention Debian, Docker, and the terminal. It could be a case of “git gud”, but I want to help them out with a setup like this, but with as low friction as possible. Ideally something completely GUI based, and very low maintenance.
I know of unRAID, and Portainer, but does anyone have any experience in setting up something like this for people whose knowledge of self hosting and networking aren’t as good as yours?
Check out https://casaos.io/
Make them an unraid usb and then they can just stick in a spare pc and they should be good to go. Then they can use the gui to download and install docker images. Would be the path of least resistance IMO.
then you can show them how to depmod their nvidia card for passthrough and configure their raid array and enable docker and know which repositories are good and which magic numbers to put in the docker file then how to configure the first run of the servers and hope it all doesn’t blow up. It’s not that easy for people with no technical experience.
If you’re going to do something, do it well.
I’ve set up unraid, truenas, proxmox so far. Unraid is my current and favorite solution. I don’t think any of them are ready to be installed and setup by normal users, but any of them can be setup by someone knowledgeable and then used/updated by a normal user.