+1 for both comments above.
Back up your current disk! If you do it properly you can always restore your current operating system if this experiment doesn't pan out.
Fedora KDE is an excellent starter choice. The DE will feel relatively familiar coming from Windows and Fedora is very much a batteries included distro. Red Hat guides are excellent and very useful in that family.
That's not even to mention declarative, rootless, podman containers via systemd or quadlet (the containers, too, can be NixOS)!
NixOS Containers can also be a good option if you don't care about rootless.
Another one for Tuta, with addy.io as a proxy service. Nice integration with Bitwarden for making new accounts + it's simple to make rules based on the to address for easy filtering.
Would there be any harm in using this in conjunction with something like Stirling to edit with one and read with the other?
Apparently I'm in the minority, but I love Logseq. I've used it with Syncthing for personal notes and grad school for the past three years with no hiccups. Maybe my success with it is partially due to nested bullet points already being how my brain works but the default paradigm is perfect for me.
The plain markdown files are organized reasonably, so I can straight up use Vim as my notes editor if I want.
Tags (#) create a new page to easily circle back to topics later without interrupting your thought pattern to make that structure manually. Once you leave edit mode for the line the tag becomes a link to that page. Some of my favorites are #clothes-that-fit (where I can easily embed a picture of the tag of what I'm trying on to look for deals online later), or #reading-list.
It's just so useful.
I haven't experienced that at all and I embed all kinds of pictures and links in my 2-3 years of grad school + personal notes. How many is "a lot" to you?
If it genuinely is a logeq problem did you ever try splitting notes into multiple graphs for different topics?
You're right, the server, cryptographic library, and all clients are open source.
That said, I have a few personal caveats.
Sharing via link is a fairly recent feature, which makes Signal useful as a Discord / Matrix competitor. Previously, group additions had to be from someone creating or already in a group.
That depends heavily on where you are in the country.
if you could start again in your self hosting journey, what would you do differently? :)
That's an excellent question.
If I were to start over, the first thing that I would do is start by learning the basics of networking and set up a VPN! IMO exposing services to the public internet should be considered more of an advanced level task. When you don't know what you don't know, it's risky and frankly unnecessary.
The lowest barrier to entry for a personal VPN, by far, is Tailscale. Automatic internal DNS and clients for nearly any device makes finding services on a dedicated machine really, really, easy. Look into putting a tailscale client right into the compose file so you automatically get an internal DNS records for a service rather than a whole machine.
From there, play around with more ownership (work) with regard to what can touch your network. Switch from Tailscale's "trusted" login to hosting your own Headscale instance. Add a PiHole or AdGuard exit node and set up your own internal DNS records.
Maybe even scrap the magic (someone else's logic that may or may not be doing things you need) and go for a plain-Jane Wireguard setup.
Well y'know, tomato potato
Shamelessly stolen from reddit.
For that workload? I quite literally run more than that on a (le)potato