Hi all,
I want to spin up a small home server. Nothing crazy, maybe 4 or 8GB ram at most. 1 Docker instance running a few privacy frontends (Invidious, Redlib, Xcancel, SearxNG, etc.) and split tunneling VPN connections for each one.
Obviously, a Raspberry Pi 4 or higher is the internet’s favorite choice, but I don’t need wireless connectivity, I just need a single HDMI and 2 USB ports to get everything set up, one ethernet port, and a dream in my heart.
Has anyone use alternatives like Le Potato or Orange Pi? I’m curious what their community support is like, and if there’s a FOSS-friendly standard.
Thanks!


It always starts small. I started with a 15 year old pre-ryzen AMD laptop, and an old external USB 4TB hard drive. NEW the laptop was $299.
A year later, I have a ruckus/brocade managed switch, a Lenovo M700 Tiny running home assistant and Jellyfin, while my main media/file server is a Xeon E3-1275v3 with 2 SSDs, and 6 8TiB SAS3 enterprise hard drives in a ZFS pool. And a Pi5 running adguard home as my DNS server.
And I’ve already used 60% of it. 🤣🤣