I had to sell my kidney to buy one RAM yesterday /s

Ubuntu 25.10 + Wayland + Gnome 49 + Nvidia driver v580.95 (RTX 3070 Ti) works flawlessly for both gaming and normal apps.

Anything other than rolling release, as stability matters more when you are dealing with server setup. So, Ubuntu LTS, Debian should be good fit.

My 12 years old Alienware M14x R2 [1] is doing great as a homelab. I have the following services running on rootless docker container:

1. Nextcloud AIO
2. Element
3. AdguardHome
4. Jellyfin
5. SearxNG
6. Vaultwarden
7. … and few other services as well

So far, I managed to utilized around ~6 GB out 16 GB RAM. Throughput wise, it is doing great (over LAN and over Tailscale).

If you have any old laptop unutilized, you may try to repurpose it as one of your homelabs.

[1]https://dl.dell.com/manuals/all-products/esuprt_laptop/esuprt_alienware_laptops/alienware-m14x-r2_reference guide_en-us.pdf

You are most likely using Cloudflared together with pi-Hole.

You may want to check-out AdGuardHome (open source) which has out-of-the-box DOH support.

https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardHome

I’m running SearxNG as rootless docker container on my homelab for nearly 2 years now. I have connected it to Internet via VPN.

Use a reverse proxy like Traefik to access your services via subdomain like paperless.yourdomain.com.

The advantage of that approach is you will be connected to Traefik on port either 443 or 80 (based on your Traefik setup). Most firewall will allow connection to port 443 or 80.

docker-ce v29 update somehow messed up my homelab so badly that I had to downgrade to v28 to restore my system.

Sorry, I just noticed that now.

You may create a bootable/live USB with Mint [1] installed on it, and try it out to see if its works perfectly for you - from functional and performance POV.

With Linux, at least you will continue to get security patches. For Win 7 and 10 are out of support now.

[1]https://linuxmint-installation-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/burn.html

Self hosting essentially stores all of your data on your hard drive, but it also allows access to that via local network (while at home) and over internet via secured tunnel (e.g. Wireguard tunnel, Tailscale) while away from home.

Thanks for the info.

The good news is Nvidia consumer grade GPUs don’t even support vGPU and can’t be passed though if Host OS is using it.

My 3070Ti also doing just fine - both for Gaming and for running Llama.

Now, to be honest, I never had a chance to use AMD GPU on Linux, so I can’t really say if it is at par with AMD GPU performance or not.

When it comes to Nvidia driver for Linux, my suggestion is - always stick to the version you find stable enough.

In my case, Last Nvidia 580 driver version works smoothly on my Desktop. Earlier I was on 550.

On a side note, faulty RAM often cause system freeze/crash. You might want to run memtest from boot menu as well.

PGP integration? Thunderbird has in-built support for PGP, isn’t it?

BTW, most of my incoming emails are routed (and encrypted) via addy.io and never faced any issue in opening encrypted (and signed) emails in Thunderbird.

Off-topic: For RSS feed, you might want to have a look at Miniflux[1] if your also into self-hosting.

[1] https://github.com/miniflux/v2

Is it a docker based solution? If yes, can you please let me know if you faced any specific challenge in setting it up?

and a lot of random external drives

Somehow it rings home :-)

Thunderbird