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This is old news.

I use flym (from f-droid): https://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.frju.flym/ - recently found it has been discontinued. But it works so well, I will probably keep using it for many years - there are no bugs to be fixed for my use case.

As long as you learn, I would encourage you to start right now and see where it takes you. Maybe you discover that is enough and you save yourself the money for other hardware. Or maybe you realize you need a Low power NAS for Photos, a silent Intel NUC for media, a PI for pihole and a dedicated server with VMs for each instance of software you want run / toy.

I find that hosting photos server never worked for me. Is frustrating to wait for a gallery web page to load, browser has to download lots of thumbnails and many requests and latency + is hard to search recursively in nested folders. Is cheap to have a memory card on the phone and load them instantly and just put them on the NAS from time to time.

For Media I did use a Raspberry PI3, but I don’t like PIs as servers. They are slow and hot and I experienced some micro sdcard issues during power loss. One advantage is that they have HDMI CEC so you don’t need a separate remote if you plug it to your TV.

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