It's Hard to Stay Motivated
I got Jellyfin up and running, it's 10/10. I love this thing, and it reinvigorated my love for watching movies. So I decided to tackle all the other services I wanted, starting with Paperless-ngx...
What a nightmare. It doesn't have a Windows install so I made an Ubuntu VM. Don't get me started on Ubuntu. I just spent about 12hrs trying to get Portainer to cooperate and had to give up. I tried just installing Paperless the "normal way" and had to give up on that too.
My point: if you're getting started selfhosting you have to embrace and accept the self-inflicted punishment. Good luck everybody, I don't know if I can keep choosing to get disappointed.
Edit: good news! Almost everything I wanted to do is covered by Jellyfin which can be done in Windows.
I know linux isn't for everyone, but self hosting on windows is self-inflicted punishment. It's just not the right platform. Sure it's doable, but it's death by a thousand papercuts.
also Ubuntu will add more complexity to things, Debian will cover most of what you need.
I wish I knew this before I started.
But my headless Ubuntu is working now, so I am not changing it.
Don't rush it. You will have plenty of opportunities to change into Debian when your Ubuntu stops working.
Be me whose server is on Ubuntu 18.04 and needs upgrading to get Bluetooth into home assistant 😭
For what it's worth, I usually install Ubuntu Server instead of Debian because it comes with a few more things out-of-the-box that I would install anyway. I have several installations of 22.04 that have been upgraded since 16.04 and they work no problem. (I also have a few Debian installations working similarly well.)
I made my jump from Ubuntu Server to Debian when I containerized everything onto a single proxmox machine.
How so?
Took maybe 5 minutes total to install paperless-ngx in docker on a Debian vm. No hassles, no headaches.
The problem is trying to install tools built for Linux on Windows.
You're better than me
I didn't mean it that way.
If you have a spare computer, install proxmox on it.
There are loads of tutorials how to do this, it has a good installer, after which it's all a web based GUI.
Use it to spin up VMs to your heart's content, create scripts to automatically provision a new Ubuntu or Debian or whatever flavour. Or run up some Windows VMs. You can pass through GPUs and other devices (tho this can be difficult, again lots of tutorials out there).
Be prepared to spend some time learning proxmox. It took me 2 or 3 installs to figure out the best way to set up networks, storage etc. Mostly cause I just jumped in, found something that could be better, googled that and found a useful tutorial on it so started again.
But once proxmox is running, everything else become so much easier
I don't think proxmox is great if you don't know Linux yet. It's an additional tool to understand. But I do regret not getting into proxmox earlier, since it makes trying new things so much easier.
could you share some tutorials? i'm thinking to rebuild to setup better storage for VMs and backups
That's a pretty broad question.
How many nodes are you running? Are you using CEPH? Or another flavour of distributed storage? Or external nas/san? Or just local arrays? Zfs? Btrfs?
What's your backup strategy? Do you use Proxmox Backup Server?
If you can figure out what you don't like about your current setup, there will probably be a tutorial or article about alternatives.
Sometimes they can be applied without having to reinstall (actually, 99% of them probably can. Sometimes I just find it easier to start from scratch tho)
Windows is just not ready for this stuff. Most of this stuff is built for Linux. Linux is THE server OS. And windows is painful for developers too, so there's less solutions for it.
You'll be a lot better off with Linux for self hosting.