What do you want to use it for? Like software dev or something to host like next cloud or whatever?
My 2 cents:
Simple, no domain required stuff:
- Pi-hole for self-hosted DNS: https://pi-hole.net/
- Navidrome for self-hosted music server: https://www.navidrome.org/ (best to pair this with an external portable HDD/SSD for music storage)
- Set up syncthing on it and use it for automatic file back-up: https://syncthing.net/ (that external HDD/SSD will come in handy again).
More advanced, should pair with a domain:
- Nextcloud for your own personal cloud/calendar/etc: https://nextcloud.com/ - it won’t be blazing fast but it will work well, I had it running on a pi for a while.
- Simple web hosting - the pi is great for hosting low traffic stuff like blogs etc.
Best is so subjective.
I am running pivpn, pihole, all the arrs, jellyfin, gitea and rundeck.
The raspi is either a small hacking tool, or a learning tool. It certainly isn’t ideal for things like nextcloud, but it is by far the coolest and most fun way to learn Linux and self hosted services. I ran emulation station, did nextcloud, pihole, pivpn, fail2ban, did robotics, learned python. I now use it for one thing - pivpn (Wireguard) and pihole to access my home network remotely
I originally got it for some robotic projects, but ended up not needing it. Thought maybe I could put it to good use, so here I am.
https://github.com/marchah/pi-htpc-download-box this is great! I have a Plex server running on my shield pro
