From a non-technical user, Helium ships with the Manifest V2 version of Ublock Origin and has all forms of telemetry removed. So it’s more private than the base Chromium browser. I switch between Firefox forks and Helium, depending on whether a specific website works better in a chromium browser or not.
I like Sayonara
People are mentioning pyrite. There are also many other examples that all fit into the cubic crystal system. Geology, yo!
Hardware: what you currently have on hand to play around with.
Software: start with something simple and well documented. Not quite the driver for the learning phase, in my personal opinion.
“Utilities” as you call them: What is useful to you? What do you want to play with or need to improve your personal use case?
I don’t mean to be flippant with my answers here. Do a little introspection and determine what is genuinely useful for you to self host. I personally run Technitium, Jellyfin, a portion of the "-arr"s, Immich, and Navidrome. My family uses all of these services/utilities on a daily basis, so they are useful for me to host. I have some of the services that need CPU and GPU processing power running on my gaming PC and others running on a Lenovo ThinkCenter that I got for free from the IT department at work. They have bins of PCs slated for recycling that work perfectly fine but are “outdated”.
I really appreciate the explanation. I’m glad that is not what I did and disgusted, but not surprised in the least, that other men do that shit.
Full disclosure, in one instance, I have been that staring man, only out of specific curiosity and never out of hostility. There was an employee at Microcenter that transitioned, and I honestly couldn’t tell if it was the same employee I recognized from their pre-transition days. So I tried to subtly figure it out without verbally asking and still probably ended up making it uncomfortable.
Yes, I’m a geologist by education and career. I self-host a few different services but keep them all on my LAN. Setting up Netbird is on my to-do list, but I’m simply not confident enough in the network security aspects to expose anything outside of a VPN tunnel.