I have pihole running on an old Raspberry Pi B and it just chugs along. Except for the wonky update they put out a few months ago. That took some cleaning up after.
I check the dashboard a few times a day and it’s a good way to notice network issues and misbehaving programs.
I’m also running it through cloudflared to encrypt the requests, in case my ISP is snooping on them.

Given pihole’s recent record with updates, I’m not sure I want them firing automatically.

Unfortunately I can’t remember whether I downloaded pihole from some package manager within DietPi, or whether I used the instructions on pihole’s site. It’s not hard either way, it’s really just one package.

I run it for my pi-hole. It’s been great. It tells you when there are package updates when you log in, which I find helpful.

Lots of Lemmy forums have a problem with stupid rage bait being left up. Like this could be in /c/programming since X is a program after all.

Not the person you were responding to, but I’m quite happy with my DS220+. It’s on 106 days of uptime after a power out. The interface / OS is very friendly. The only downside is the weak processor which makes it inadequate for things like Immich’s AI or heavy Jellyfin use - but you get what you pay for.
Re. lemons; are you sure it was the NAS that had issues or could it have been the drives? Mine is loaded with WD Red drives iirc.

Obsidian synced via git.

Damn right.

I would prefer to have GPUs for under $600 if possible

Unfortunately not possible for a new nvidia card (you want CUDA) with 16GB VRAM. You can get them for ~$750 if you’re patient. This deal was available for awhile earlier today:
https://us-store.msi.com/Graphics-Cards/NVIDIA-GPU/GeForce-RTX-50-Series/GeForce-RTX-5070-Ti-16G-SHADOW-3X-OC
Or you could try to find a 16GB 4070Ti Super like I got. It runs Deepseek 14B and stuff like Stable Diffusion no problem.

Can’t figure out why you would use Plex over jellyfin

Probably the biggest reason is that it makes it so easy to securely share across the internet. With JF you’re on your own and you can really fuck things up. If you’re just running it on your LAN the JF is the obvious choice.

Everything I hear about Nextcloud scares me away from messing with it.