You didn’t mention your budget. That will impact things.

If you have a closet with a rack you have a lot of options, hardware-wise. If you’ll be running this in your living room, for sake of your sanity, something like an AMD mini-PC with a small NAS for additional hosted storage via NFS would probably be your best bet.

A PC with Proxmox could do this handily. I have a cheap Ryzen 5500u mini PC hosting my Plex server, audiobookshelf, home assistant, and DLNA server (AssetUPnP). It’s only 6 core/12 thread and32GB RAM but still has resources to spare. You could totally do an 8c/16t one and throw more RAM at it.

——

Edit - oh, and don’t forget that if you’re going to be hosting a public instance, you’ll need a good internet connection (with good up and down speed, generally fiber is good for that) and a public IP.

I keep all my important files on a NAS already, so my desktop is pretty much exchangeable, only takes maybe 20-30 mins at most to get up and running including the install time.

1. Sync my Calibre library to NAS before making the change (I have a rsync one-liner for this)
2. Boot to USB and install new OS
3. Log in and run system updates (pacman -Syu in this case)
4. Create my disk paths if needed (I make /home/$USER/Disks/ and in that path NVMe, sda, sdb, sdc, etc.)
5. Make network share folders on home directory (NAS folders for music and general NAS share)
6. Copy over my /etc/fstab modifications from my back up file on the NAS to automount disks and NAS shares on boot
7. Install Calibre
8. Pull down books from backup
9. Launch Firefox, install uBlock Origin and Dark Reader extensions

That’s pretty much it for desktop. If it’s my gaming PC, the “Calibre” portions there would be swapped with installing Steam and Heroic Launcher, but otherwise the same.

I’m not a fan. I used Cachy for several months but ran into a variety of issues. The repo tends to be a bit behind because it’s only a single maintainer handling it, but it also doesn’t seem to play nice with the standard arch repo and mixing.

It feels like the Manjaro thing all over again.

Despite its claims of speed I found it to perform no better than Endeavor OS, but it was a lot more unstable.

I’ve switched back to Endeavor with no complaints.