To be fair, if you want to sync your work across two machines, Git is not ideal because well, you must always remember to push, If you don’t push before switching to the other machine, you’re out of luck.

Syncthing has no such problem, because it’s real time.

However, it’s true that you cannot combine Syncthing and Git. There are solutions like https://github.com/tkellogg/dura, but I have not tested it.

There’s some lack of options in this space. For some, it might be nicer to run an online IDE.

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To add something, I second the “just use Git over ssh without installing any additional server”. An additional variation is using something like Gitolite to add multi-user support to raw Git, if you need to support multiple users and permissions; it’s still lighter than running Forgejo.

Reminder that you can go for hybrid approaches; receive email and host IMAP/webmail yourself, and send emails through someone like AWS. I am not saying you can’t do SMTP yourself, but if you want to just dip your toes, it’s an option.

You get many of the advantages; you control your email addresses, you store all of the email and control backups, etc.

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And another thing: you could also play with https://chatmail.at/relays ; which is pretty cool. I had read about Delta Chat, but decided to play with it recently and… it’s blown my mind.

If you are going to run Jellyfin or some other media sharing, the key is if you need to transcode media (recompress because the playback device cannot handle it or not). Likely not, nowadays, but research that. If you need transcoding, research; you might get by with an old CPU, or maybe hardware transcoding support, but it’s difficult.

Outside transcoding, for file sharing/streaming, every simultaneous client will require additional horsepower and disk transfer usage. If you are the sole client, then likely you can do with an old CPU. But if you and three people more in your household are going to be using the system at the same time, it might be a bit complex.

One of my home servers is a 4gb of RAM, with a “Intel® Celeron® CPU G1610T @ 2.30GHz”. It’s very old and low end, but for file sharing it works quite well, but it rarely has more than a single simultaneous user.

Yep, I do that on Debian hosts, EL (RHEL/Rocky/etc.) have a similar feature.

However, you need to keep an eye for updates that require a reboot. I use my own Nagios agent that (among other things) sends me warnings when hosts require a reboot (both apt/dnf make this easy to check).

I wouldn’t care about last online/reboots; I just do some basic monitoring to get an alert if a host is down. Spontaneous reboots would be a sign of an underlying issue.