Also curious about the time sinks! Fingers crossed no issues with my services so far. The initial setup was tedious: configuring multiple services with their own configuration intricacies, and having proper backups. I am looking for something that would help reduce the setup toil, maybe something like nix?

Part of it is the fact that I'm using USB storage for my RAID, which is a little finicky. Another part is that I'm using this server as my router as well, which means that when things break I kind of have to fix them immediately, and since my network cards are thunderbolt I have to rely on the finicky Linux thunderbolt support.

For reasons not clear to me, if a system update requires compiling a large thing (e.g. Immich + TritonLLVM), 95% of the time it will break the internal LAN's network interface. I think updating is important (especially for a router), this means that a few times a week I have to babysit the system update to be there to reboot the server manually.