Hey guys, sort of at the beginning of my journey here. Current setup is a Synology DS420+ It is running Emby, Audiobook Shelf and Cloudflare Tunnels to allow me to access stuff externally and serve it up to friends and family.

To stream from here I’m currently using an apple tv 4k with the infuse app to make sure any transcoding happens on the apple tv 4k instead of the server with the tiny celeron processor, I believe that’s how it works.

I just added an older lenovo yoga x1 carbon 8th gen intel i5 laptop running HAOS (Home assistant OS) after I had this setup I had read you don’t really want to use a laptop as an always on device as the battery could swell. Will likely take it down today and see if I can remove the battery and run it on AC power only.

My plans are to get a device running proxmox and throw on Sonarr, Radarr, Kapowarr and maybe some other arr services, as well as eventually pihole, a local LLM to integrate into my HAOS setup. I eventually would like to make an edge router running opnsense as well but trying to approach it one project at a time. This is where you guys come in.

Trying to figure out what my hardware stack should be going forward. Should I just buy a used mini PC off FB market place to get the easier to run services going and then worry about something like a Local LLM at a later point? Trying to move away from google home and google services as much as possible and this is one of the keystones in the plan to degoogle the house. Other option is just to go with a normal desktop setup like a ryzen 5000 series desktop with as many cores and threads I can afford plus 64gb+ of ram to tackle all services and future proof a bit. I’m sure I can do this with a mini PC as well might just be more expensive and possibly harder to find. Finally last option is a cluster of mini PCs. This sounds the funnest but also seems like it would be the most laborious? I’ve never setup a cluster so i’m sure there’s a ton to learn there but it also sounds like a pain to have to remember what service is on what machine to be able to remote in(sure this can be fixed with some notes and over time i’ll remember).

Also for HAOS i’ll be building out a pretty robust smart home over time ( our old house was smart when we purchased it and I really missed that aspect of it ) just thinking that HAOs will likely have tens of devices on it but probably under a 100.

My intuition is to lean towards either the mini pc or the full desktop for prox mox, buy something to run all of the easy to run services and eventually tackle something for the Local LLM as i’ll likely need a GPU for that or a ton of shared RAM on an APU.

If you were in my position what would you do? How would you approach this homelab? Thanks for the input in advance!