It looks very interesting!

But I don’t see the unique selling point of it compared to alacritty and kitty, besides web-enabled. Is there anything that it does better than these 2?

That looks promising, especially since my current status bar is also just a collection of shell scripts, so that might be easier to switch

Thanks! That looks exactly like what I was looking for. I hope it works as promising as it looks :)

Thanks, that was a very interesting read!

I forgot one essential tool, where I need a recommendation for: spotlight. I use it to switch quickly between applications or to folders. Keyboard shortcut, first letter of the application name and enter… I know there are solutions, but I only heard from Ubuntu, which I don’t want. Anything simple and fast you can recommend?

Thank you everyone for all your suggestions! I’ll quickly try to summarize them for myself. So what you suggest is:

Operating Systems:

• NixOs
• Debian 12
• ElementaryOS
• mint
• PopOs
• EndevourOS
• Fedora
• arch
• Opensuse
• Novara

Tiling Window Manager:

Recomended to use something based on wayland.

• hyprland (can be configured from file, good compatibility with nix)
• sway (proposed with Debian, multiple suggestions, config via file as well, good for custom keybindings, already options for sway in nixos)
• i3
• bspwm
• KDE Plasma
• dwm / dwl

Status Bar:

• swaybar (in case of using sway)
• waybar (when using wayland)
• eww
• ags
• KDE neon

Package Managers:

• flatpack
• brew (is this already stable enough?)
• Nix (obvious choice if nix os chosen)
• snap
• (pacman if arch)
• integrated one

Packages:

• together with wayland alacritty or kitty
• foot
• Yakuake
• suckless

At the moment I am trying to avoid anything where RedHat is involved. Not because of the recent controversy, but simply IBM is known to kill their software solutions on a whim. (although i still use ansible), so Fedora is unfortunately out (again, no judging on how great it is). I’ve been quite interested in EndevourOS, so that might be fun to try out. Debian for the desktop probably not right now. I’m running it on servers for stability, but for a desktop environment, i prefer having more recent packages (e.g. neovim). The “sales pitch” for Mint sounded pretty interesting as well. However i’ll give NixOs a try first, simply because it was mentioned very often, same with sway.

Based on this i’ll try out these combinations first:

1. NixOs with sway and eww
2. NixOs with hyprland and waybar
3. NixOs with dwl and ?

If this does not satisfy, i’ll look into endevourOS and mint, but that might require some Ansible I assume.

Thank you very much!

It might have. I’ve tried nixos on a mini PC meant as a home server, so most configuration is done via SSH and users don’t change (much), I might have accidently activate it while trying nixos out.

Making users unable to login is a bit of an odd (side?) Effect, but maybe I’m not understanding the purpose of this option correctly. I’ll stay away from it for now :D

The issue was much more straightforward than i thought. It seems sometimes thinking of too complex issues will hinder finding the easiest cause - the local forewall on the pi was blocking it / had no explcite allow.

To check i did: sudo ufw status verbose

There was only port 22

I added the new port as Allow Port 8081: sudo ufw allow 8081

And it works now!

The issue was much more straightforward than i thought. It seems sometimes thinking of too complex issues will hinder finding the easiest cause - the local forewall on the pi was blocking it / had no explcite allow.

To check i did: sudo ufw status verbose

There was only port 22

I added the new port as Allow Port 8081: sudo ufw allow 8081

And it works now! Thanks for all the tipps that pointed me in the right direction!

Thanks for the hints, this definitely helped, however it did not solve the issue.

What i did:

1. I changed via omv-firstaid the omv port from 80 to 8081.
2. I confirmed with ss -ltn that this change was successful and i see the listening port 80 vanished, while this now popped up:

State Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address:Port Peer Address:Port

LISTEN 0 511 0.0.0.0:8081 0.0.0.0:*

3. I tested locally via ssh from the pi the connection via curl http://mylocalip:8081/ and it works, i get the html back
4. I tested from my laptop (connected to my router via WiFi, where the raspberry is meshed into via the repeater in between) and i still get the timeout.
5. I tried tunneling again via ssh ssh -L 8081:localhost:8081 pi@raspberrypi.local and i did not get any errors this time. However when i open the local url in the browser i get a connection reset and my terminal shows me channel 3: open failed: administratively prohibited: open failed. However this just says that TcPForwarding is disabled, which is fine, so that tunneling issue should not be the main problem, i assume.

Quick Update:

I’ve been evaluating the best options and decided to wait a few months, until more devices are out and the ones i am looking at become cheaper.

I have decided for a proof of concept or intermediate solution by using the raspberry pi with openmediavault and 2x 2TB SSDs connected via USB, as well as SnapRaid to sync them. This should suffice for storage and test in shortterm. However i ran into an issue with the connection to OMV here:
OMV not reachable

My options for later:

1. The Beelink S12 Pro with 16 GB of RAM and 512GB storage. Unfortunately this will be a limited option, as most sources state that 16Gb is the max for this model. (some say 32GB). However it is cheap, a good start and in the long run i could buy more powered by solar to create a highly available mini cluster via k3s.

2. Morefine M9, slightly more expensive, but with a 1TB SSD and can be upgraded to 32GB for sure. Unfortunately it’s not directly available in my country, but i’ve found a reseller, who seems to have it under a new brand name.

3. Passively Cooled Firewall appliance with no ssd or ram, also N100 or N305. Has good reviews on the common yputube channels, in the end more expensive, but better ports and 4x 2,5GbE. It sounds interesting, but its only sold via a chinese trading company on amazon.

4. An older i3 1120g4 or something similar, which would allow me to use 64GB of RAM. Unfortunately i found literally no devices with it being sold at all.

Generally i’d prefer 64GB and 6 to 8 Cores, but in the low power area that is tough to find. The N305 has 8 cores, but max 32GB RAM, the i3 allows 64GB but nothing is being sold, as for the N100 is cheap, but only 4 cores (might be sufficient, if i later extend to a mini cluster powered powered by solar), but also limited to 32GB.

In general, nothing really ideal, so i hope that later this year either more devices drop in price or become available (like anything with the N300 would be interesting too).

What do you guys think of these choices for a mini beginner budget low power homelab ? (the description becomes longer over time…)

Can you recommend some devices? Most of the ones i saw had good prices, but not performance relative to power usage. The N100 with its 4 efficiency cores is actually quite good for the price and power usage. Unfortunately most mini pcs with it have limited ports.

I also think, that 2 ssds might be sufficient for the beginning. I’m even thinking of just adding 2 external ssd’s and call it a day for the beginning (one as backup), but that does not scale well.

The jbod idea sounds good to explore further, as it tha home server and storage would be separated. However it would add an additional device to the power bill.

However i don’t need the full amount of all disks at all times. If i’d want to unplug via shell script, i’d need to plug it manually in person back in for storing things. I actually do not need it running all the time, as the home server ssd can cache most of what i need recently in access. The jbod is then more an archive.

i’m mainly looking for a way to power down the inexpensive hdd’s. I could use the raspberry pi as the jbod controller, but it does not properly support wake on lan, so thats also not an option