As far as changed your life, there are not too many that i really love, that made a massive difference to how i do things. But there is one:

Paperless_ngx

ALL of my paper work, receipts, transcripts, tax, shares, council rates. Everything goes in there. We no longer have paper lieing everywhere (well, my wife is another matter, still keeps grocery shopping reciepts...). when i get soimething in the mail, i used the paperless app to "scan" it, upload it, then bin the paper.

An actual life change that i didn't know i needed.

Honestly Plex/Emby/Jellyfin whichever you prefer is a gamechanger because if you have a large library of content then it just cuts the cord from the subscription services.

I've always been happy to pay for them until I went on holiday last January and realised that none of my services were working due to going to a country that was out of the way and the only way to access them was to use a VPN.

So having my own Netflix is a great thing.

Tailscale while doing the above is also really cool

Home Assistant. It's a rabbit hole, but it's great. I've got motion enabled lights, thermostats for "dumb" heaters, and I track device usage (tablet, xbox) of my kids.

Self hosting nothing changed my life.

So much free time and less stress once I abandoned self hosting 😅

Vaultwarden is pretty game changing. No more reusing passwords and they aren't in the cloud.

PiHole!

One of the easiest installer I've ever seen. Significantly less ads to be shown especially one on non-browser.

For me it's 100% Nextcloud. It was a pain to get working at first (and I'm dreading the day it breaks, if that happens). But it is so much more than just a self-hosted Dropbox solution:

• Maps
• Calendar
• Email
• Markdown editor (I'm using this to try and replace Google Drive for collaborative document editing with my friends; most of what we need can be achieved with Markdown formatting)
• I haven't tried it but there is a Talk plugin that allows for video conferencing in browser;
• a bunch of other stuff I've never played with like mind maps, PDF conversion, music player, etc.

Swinger parties?

Stay away from Plex, if you like to go with Free and Open source.

I'll start with Jellyfin, and Arr family (sonarr,radarr,prowlarr or Jackett), Vaultwarden and immich

Edit: Learn to spin up docker instances first, as above services would be easier to manage in docker containers and for back ups I prefer Duplicati. And if you run it 24x7 add AdguardHome or PiHole to the mix

Edit1: if you are extremely new to docker instances and find it hard to learn, just spin up CasaOS and you'll be good to go as it makes spinning up docker containers so easy.

FreshRSS, news and websites fetched your way. You can even create feeds for websites that don't provide one

Portainer - For docker containers.

AdGuard Home on 2 separate Raspberry Pi Pico W.

HomeAssistant on its own hardware. Home automation

SearXNG - private search.

Whoogle - private search.

Shaarli - Bookmarks.

youtube-dl - downloading videos.

PaperlessNGX - document storage.

Trilium Notes - notes app

These are the ones I can't live without. All docker containers running on a NAS.

Actual Budget I use to track my finance.

Duplicacy for backups to OneDrive and Backblaze

Photoprism as Google replacement

Exactly a couple of things that we (me and the wife) use really often:

• AdGuard Home is IMHO so much easier to use, although it has been a while since I've used Pi-Hole.
• CouchDB for the Obsidian LiveSync plugin
• Immich for a self hosted Google Photos alternative
• Nginx Proxy Manager for exposing all of my services
• Vaultwarden is invaluable for us

Hosting a wedding has a pretty good chance to be life changing

An RSS reader (I use Miniflux), ended up being extremely useful

• Almost every piece of software worth selfhosting has an RSS feed for updates (e.g., every GitHub releases page has an RSS feed). I started selfhosting a good deal more after setting up Miniflux.
• Like omg there is this whole internet out there outside of Reddit/Twitter/etc that does RSS. The vast majority of blogs have RSS (e.g., Wordpress and Substack). I wish I had discovered RSS decades ago, so many websites I've forgotten because I would check updates manually and eventually just forget. I even host a personal Nitter instance so I can follow Twitter people in Miniflux.

Running a Tor exit node could certainly be life changing. Not sure in a good way, guess it depends which country you live in.

Nextcloud to replace Google drive/docs. Jellyfin or plex for media. The arrs to aquire media (if you have the patience). A blog? A game server to play with friends.

I suggest using docker and docker-compose as it makes everything way easier. It does still take time and it can be frustrating but it is very rewarding.

Crosspost from the duplicate

For me it’s a HomeAssistant instance. Great product that has some very tangible use cases that can benefit ones household in terms of being able to implement nice automations etc, and also a great hub in that it supports such a broad range of products and services. As an Apple user in particular its one of the great ways to get non HomeKit certified devices working with Siri/Homekit on my other Apple products.

It also makes installing addons a breeze including other products people have mentioned here such as AdGuard Home (as a PiHole alternative) and the like.

A few years ago I’d say it wasn’t for the average Joe, but I think the product has really matured and is much simpler than it used to be. There’s a strong community out there too.

For multimedia I’d say Plex personally, but Jellyfin would be another option. Good way to manage personal media libraries.

Parties.

WireGuard, helpful for accessing stuff on your internal network that you don't want to expose while you're out.

Your own nextcloud instance. Then move everything that is saved at Google over to your own server.

Calenders, Filesync, Contacts sync with android works really nice.

Knowing my data is stored only on my own devices and google doesn't know more about me than I do is a nice feeling.

After what happened to imgur and gfycat, definitely their own image hosting service.

Home Assistant is nice! Have it integrated with some smart lights and smart plugs. Makes it easy to monitor and control everything locally.

We have it set up in our room so that one widget controls the lights, one controls the fans, one controls the monitors, then there's a master button that we use to turn off everything that doesn't need to be always on whenever we leave the room.

Want to play with some fancier stuff with it too, but that alone is incredibly convenient.

• Pi hole
• Syncthing(was able to replace Dropbox for my keepass database when they decide to limit number of devices for free tier) - perfect for regularly updated files and backups for photos, etc.
• Audiobookshelf - great way to manage audiobooks, also has a nice android app plus can turn each audiobook/series/collection of books into RSS and put in your favorite podcast app
• Plex/Jellyfin for media collections

I have a PiHole, my own EdgeRouter that is behind the Verizon router, a UPS, a wired switch, a SiliconDust HD HomeRun to convert my cable to a stream, my Hue controller, my Camera DVR, and a Pi4 hosting network storage.

It all fits neatly in a 6U closet rack. I use the EdgeRouter to host a VPN I can connect into to manage things for the house, and also use it to dial out to a VPN, so I can connect the TVs in the house to a VPN abroad.

I also have a Smart Garden powered by a raspberry pi, connected to a rain barrel, a water pump, some solenoids, and some moisture sensors.

DNS. It's always DNS

A NAS or Nextcloud or some other way of having files available remotely.

Having a big box with a lot of storage that you can put things on from anywhere is so incredibly useful.

If you spend some time learning how docker/podman works you'll be able to host practically anything!

I started with Plex, but I would say it wasn't until I spun up Nextcloud and got it running that I really would say my life changed. My entire family now has Nextcloud accounts, a family calendar, instant upload of pictures from my phone, all my recipes, and I even have OnlyOffice document server running for editing documents in Nextcloud.

The one that was lifechanging for me is audiobookshelf. I LOVE having full ownership and control over all of my audiobooks, and the ability to enjoy them on any device I choose.

We recently set up a magic mirror (showing public transport connections/time/calendar/weather information) on a raspberry pi 3b. But it involved some more fiddling with electronics and software.

(Maybe an alternative would also be possible using small oled (128x64 pixel) screens)

Would be my suggestion if you are up for a challenge =)

We also used to host our own nextcloud, but decided to move it to hetzner as the pricing was unbeatable..

Else a pihole would also have been my suggestion. Maybe a Kodi mediacenter is also worth looking into.

I’d recommend you to look up *arr stack and Jellyfin. Good start is Trash guides. It will guide you step by step on how to properly set it up. It can completely replace Netflix and all other streaming services and its all free.

For me nextcloud was the biggest gamechanger. A raspberry pi and a SSD and suddenly I didn't have to store anything at Google drive anymore. And it's really beginner friendly, especially when using NextcloudPi