As with most things homelab related, there is no real “right” or “wrong” way, because its about learning and playing around with cool new stuff! If you want to learn about different file systems, architectures, and software, do some reading, spin up a test VM (or LXC, my preference), and go nuts!

That being said, my architecture is built up of general purpose LXCs (one for my Arr stack, one for my game servers, one for my web stuff, etc). Each LXC runs the related services in docker, which all connect to a central Portainer instance for management.

Some things are exceptions though, such as Open Media Vault and HomeAssistant, which seem to work better as standalone VMs.

The services I run are usually something that are useful for me, and that I want to keep off public clouds. Vaultwarden for passwords and passkeys, DoneTick for my todo-list, etc. If I have a gap in my digital toolkit, I always look for something that I can host myself to fill thay gap. But also a lot of stuff I want to learn about, such as the Grafana stack for observability at the moment.

Isn’t he Jewish?

Thanks for the links! Could you elaborate on why you switched to bare metal? Just curious.

That’s a pretty neat idea! I’ve been looking for a use for container notes so that’s one thing I can use it for :p