Please forgive the annoying asking for info post
I have 100Gb of stuff on Google drive and I want to move it in house, I guess via Nextcloud? At the same time I want to try things like self hosting Notesnook and a few other things like ad blocking the home network etc
I was going to try starting with a raspberry pi 5 with 8Gb of ram and an SSD and some form of Linux obvs but in my limited reading I've seen that's very not recommended for Nextcloud.
Key things are low power usage/quiet, I'm not THAT fussed about download speed to other devices but keen to avoid as much lock in as possible. Budget around £200-300 to start with.
I've seen recommendations for thin clients, kinda like the idea of a NUC but they're pricy for the form factor. Having it be small would be a plus but I do have an old windows 8 machine from 2013 in the cupboard in an ATX case but the power supply draw feels like it would be excessive
Hints appreciated or tell me which community to go check, thanks in advance
Many people like cheap refurbished thinclients, and Intel CPUs 6th gen or newer are not so bad on power consumption.
A RasberryPi has the advantage that you will find a lot of easy to follow guides and if you get a NVMe hat for it to have fast database storage then Nextcloud should be relatively happy (it is a bit bloated these days).
I would recommend going for at least an Intel 7th gen or failing that some sort of computer that has an Nvidia GPU, 1050ti or better.
Those will help as you go further down the line with allowing some CUDA and Intel acceleration features and only adds a couple of dollars to the total cost of the system.
Why CUDA? I don't see any services listed that would benefit at all from a GPU, and even if they later spun up a Jellyfin or similar that can always be mapped to the integrated GPU.
Better to start with something cheap and imperfect to learn what you actually need then upgrade from there