So Linux is a collection of different software, companies and volunteers. If you think of cars Linux is basically a paper design of an engine that anyone can use for free. Then Ferrari, Toyota, ford and all the other companies build their own physical engine on top of that. Some of the companies have “dealerships” or support but they primarily cost a lot of money and cater to companies, not people. There’s no Linux store the way there would be an apple or Microsoft store.

The comments here are right, in that most computer repair shops should be able to figure it out the same way you can take almost any car to almost any general mechanic. There might be some complicated issues that requires someone who’s good with that specific brand, but a basic install isn’t super complicated in the same way changing the oil on a car should be straightforward for all mechanics.

Since you’re in a rural community you can either do it yourself, try to find another computer repair shop, or ask a friend/family member nicely in exchange for food, money, whatever (please don’t assume this person wants to be your dedicated support person). Linux is great and it can be pretty straightforward if you dedicate some time to learning.

If you do it yourself or have a friend do it:

1. buy 2 flash drives that are at least 8GB
2. go to windows website and download the windows 11 media creation tool.
3. run the media creation tool, select one of your usb drives and go through the steps to create a “bootable USB for windows 11”. This is your failsafe if anything goes wrong. Label the usb and put it somewhere safe.
4. find a “brand” aka distro that you like. Visit their websites and look at the pictures, themes etc. Friendly options are zorinOS, Linux Mint, and Ubuntu. Framework’s website has some options and instructions.
5. follow that distros instructions or the instructions on framework’s website to create a second “bootable USB”. Don’t use the same one you used for windows.
6. The next steps will erase everything on the framework laptop including windows 11/10. Follow your specific guide.

1GB is probably enough to run one basic service without a GUI. If you want anything more than that you’re going to probably end up running out of RAM and hitting the SWAP file–grinding everything to a snail’s pace. Useful projects here might be to add smarts to something dumb around the house or making an old printer support wireless printing via cups.

Like others have said if you want to tinker, a virtual machine via virtualbox or VMware is free for your use case.

If you strongly prefer hardware, an old PC will probably be cheap or free.

If you really want a pi you’ll probably have to look for something that has at minimum 4Gb (which will be easy to outgrow), recommending 8GB+. Note that raspberry pi’s run best on the official power plug as a USB-a to micro/c won’t provide enough power to be stable and will cause weird issues or crash the pi under heavier loads or when drawing power from the pins.

My understanding is that hba cards support virtualization better than passing sata directly through. But if you’re not virtualizing the NAS, I wouldn’t see an issue with a reputable motherboard that has enough sata ports at 6 Gbps.

For the cheaper expansion cards I’d see that as a central point of failure and would recommend an hba card over a cheaper alternative.

Elastic Security Engineering and our bug bounty triage team completed a thorough analysis trying to reproduce these reports and were unable to do so. Researchers are required to share reproducible proof-of-concepts; however, they declined" - Elastic

AshES Cybersecurity confirmed that they chose not to send the PoC to Elastic or the company’s affiliates.

Elastic says that the researcher did not share the full details for the vulnerability and instead decided to make their claims public instead of following the principles of coordinated disclosure.

Israeli?

I’ll be honest that I haven’t watched his videos so maybe it ends up stable. TrueNAS basically says in their docs you can end up with weird issues.

If you host it in proxmox directly there’s less overhead, as in it’s not going bare metal > proxmox > TrueNAS > application. You might run into issues but honestly try it and keep a configuration backup if it fails. Pcie passthrough instead of devices for the HBA card and any external graphics cards works the most stable but you won’t be able to “share” those resources.

I personally like docker for most everything I can with a few things hosted within proxmox. I originally started with portainer which gave me a web GUI for docker but honestly docker-compose files are a better approach. So proxmox > debian > docker Proxmox > trueNAS and proxmox > other VMs. This has its own challenges like passing storage from the NAS to jellyfin but works for me.

As for components, I’m stable on an old office desktop computer potato (albeit it does hit some limits with file transfers and transcoding multiple streams). I wouldn’t necessarily recommend going out and buying an equivalent but if you want to mess around, don’t be afraid of not enough resources in a test config.

For #3 officially, nesting TrueNAS in another hypervisor and then using it as a hypervisor is not really recommended, especially with any kind of virtual drives. It could lead to challenges. Virtualizing drives is definitely not recommended and the most stable choice is passing pcie through with a hba card.

Given that, I have a similar setup and I’ve made backups for important data, I passed a pcie data/SAS hba card that I connect any TrueNAS drives to directly instead of a virtualized drive.

https://www.truenas.com/blog/yes-you-can-virtualize-freenas/

I personally haven’t explored self hosting mail. This thread is a year old but might give you insight from people who have.

I’ve heard about using mailbox.org to do what you’re talking about. It seems the general consensus is getting a clean IP mentioned in the thread linked above is the biggest challenge.

Edit: mailbox isn’t the what I was thinking of. I’ve definitely heard of services that let you self host half of it and just do the send receive part.

Setting up jellyfin, I used docker on debian, and an old Quadro card. What could possibly go wrong?

Turns out that week the Nvidia drivers got a faulty update pushed to debian stable and caused an error with getting the GPU to work in any container. I could either wait a week or pull the simple fix from testing. So impatiently I pulled it from testing.

Learning Linux is a great start.

Learning any coding language will help you understand a bit more about the programs will work, however there isn’t much need to actually learn a specific language unless you plan to add custom programs or scripts.

The general advice for email is don’t. It’s very risky to host and it’s a big target for spam. Plus there’s challenges getting the big companies to trust your domain.

However hosting things behind a VPN (or locally on your home network) can let you learn a lot about networking and firewalls without exposing yourself to much risk.

I have no direct experience with next cloud but I understand it can be hosted on Linux, you can buy a Synology NAS and run it in that, or use something like TrueNAS.

Personally my setup is on one physical server so I use Proxmox which lets me run 2 different Linux servers and trueNAS on one single computer through virtual machines. I like it because it lets me tinker with different stuff like home assistant and it won’t affect say my adblocker/VPN/reverse proxy. I also use Docker to run multiple services on one virtual machine without compatibility issues. If I started again, I’d probably have gotten bigger drives or invested in SSDs. My NAS is hard drives because of cost but it’s definitely hitting a limit when I need to pull a bunch of files. Super happy with wireguard-easy for VPN. I started with a proprietary version of openVPN on Oracle Linux and that was a mistake.