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.