I love forgejo for Homelabbing purposes but Mozilla Foundation has the infrastructure to deploy something like GitLab, which has a much larger feature set compared to forgejo with more targeted toward the development work on large projects. But, Mozilla said the development flow would remain mostly the same as it is now, so most of the features in GitLab, Forgejo, or GitHub will remain unused.

Basically what IverCoder said, but also sometimes I like not having to tinker with my desktop at all. I’m running through an Arch Install on my Thinkpad right now just for the fun of it and I do love this kind of thing, but I’ll admit the concept of plugging in a USB stick, installing a distro in one click, downloading my apps through Flatpak and not having to mess with the CLI a whole bunch is very appealing. Yes you can do that with Ubuntu or whatever but (at least in my workflow) you still have to mess with the CLI a bit.

Basically, I like messing with Linux sometimes but other times I just want a, I suppose Windows-like experience while still having Linux under the hood.

Waterfox is an independent fork of Firefox developed by Alex Kontos. It has several added features such as tracking protection, built in container tab support (eg private browsing in the same window, very neat feature), and Mozilla’s telemetry is disabled too. It’s a lovely little browser in general, I don’t know why I love it so much tho, you could achieve the Waterfox experience with Firefox and some addons probably. Perhaps it’s just the appeal of a (more or less) independent project to me, I don’t know. It has some history too like I think it supported x64 on Windows before Firefox did but I’m not a long time user so that might be wrong. I’d give the website a once-over if you’re interested.

lol thanks, it’s more of a side project atm as I’m juggling school and running IT for my dad’s business but I’m glad to hear it worked for you!

ahah lol that’s fair, i maintain the flatpak so whenever i see someone with Waterfox on Linux I get curious. Love the AUR but I’m mostly on immutable distros so I don’t get to use it qwq

ah a fellow Waterfox user, flatpak or appimage?

ARM software support is just generally rough, yeah it’s good on RPi (and Mac) but on other boards it typically sucks, namely the cheaper boards OP would be buying. Here’s a couple software examples though, I’m a big docker user and just the other day I was trying to run I believe Mastodon and Lemmy on an ARM device but there was just no image for it. I’m sure I could build an image myself but for someone just getting into Homelabbing (like OP), x86 is the platform to use.

I’d recommend an x86 board because as great as the RPI and similar can be, ARM just doesn’t have the same support for a lot of things you might want to self host. I personally like to spring for a used thinclient PC off of eBay, because they have about the same resources as a Raspberry Pi but on an x86 platform. With my thin clients I typically install Alpine but a really light Debian install could work as well, and then from there you can go about installing Docker etc for a little homelab. Even better, if you get lucky and get a couple of them you could mess around with clustering them and some light Kubernetes at home. I’ve got mine running PiHole and Unbound on Alpine to serve my whole house with DNS and it works great. I don’t think I’ve had hardly any downtime issues or anything of that sort.

TL;DR: try a couple cheap thin clients from eBay and you can run some light stuff on them for cheap.

As recommended by others, you might want to use a real public domain that you own, and a reverse proxy for split horizon DNS. I personally run Bind9, Unbound, and PiHole as my DNS servers. Bind9 handles split horizon, so if I request my domain internally it gets routed through Bind. Then bind hands it off to PiHole for adblocking, and PiHole makes requests through Unbound set up as a recursive DNS server which doesn’t rely on any external DNS. I also use Traefik as a reverse proxy for all of my services. My set up is more complicated than necessary, and if you want just a few local domains, PiHole + a reverse proxy is plenty good for your needs.

Here is something I wrote previously under a similar post: “Check out the OpenWRT Table of Hardware, it has a list of firmware mod-able off the shelf WiFi routers that work with, you guessed it, OpenWRT. It’s rather versatile as it’s Linux based and can handle VLANs, multiple SSIDs, and of course, you can change the DNS servers.” As I said, OpenWRT is very versatile and runs on many different routers, just find one you like and install it! Many of the supported routers provide Gigabit switching, and some even have multigit for your server connection.

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Check out the OpenWRT Table of Hardware, it has a list of firmware mod-able off the shelf WiFi routers that work with, you guessed it, OpenWRT. It’s rather versatile as it’s Linux based and can handle VLANs, multiple SSIDs, and of course, you can change the DNS servers.

If you would consider something immutable, I’ve been loving VanillaOS. Rockin’ it on a Thinkpad for the past couple of months and it’s pretty solid. I’m pretty sure it’s independent, and they are working on (basically) a v2 switching from Ubuntu to Debian as a base making it much more independent. Maybe wait until their v2 (Orchid) comes out because there are some good features the team says they’re incorporating that are kind of lacking in the current release.

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