My preference was Joplin synced through self hosted Nextcloud

I’ve self hosted for a while but never used linux desktop. Just this week I just set up dual boot on my laptop with the intention of using it 90% Linux 10% windows 10. Its been great so far & I’m enjoying the learning curve finding alternatives to what I’m used to (some of which I’m sure I can’t run on Linux - Traktor & several other more obscure things). Lots to learn but good fun & the lack of AI horseshit plus the OS not spying feels liberating.

The very first software I installed (Brave) recommended to use terminal which didn’t bother me in the slightest but it may be intimidating/offputting for mainstream.

I use windows 11 at work & at a friends who needed help. It’s absolutely loathsome, everytime I open anything there’s stupid irritating notifications & popups getting in the way when it tries to “help". Windows 10 will be the last version of Windows in our house

Mullvad. Always on. Wireguard to access home network remotely

As far as Nextcloud plugins go, aside from Memories I just run the basics such as Contacts. I sync Joplin notes through it & it all syncs to 2 x desktops & a mobile. For me the Pi5 8GB with NVMe is plenty fast enough for Nextcloud & it’s proved to be stable. I run it through Docker via Portainer. This device is also running Kopia for snapshot backups, reverse proxy & Linkwarden.

The EQ14 is running Docker, Portainer, Kopia & about 5 other self hosted apps, the most processor hungry of them being Immich & Paperless. I haven’t tested against my Pi5 setup but its anecdotally massively faster & more stable than the Pi4B 4GB that I initially deployed Immich on. The Pi4 was really slow processing more than a few images at a time & sometimes crashed whereas the EQ14 doesn’t blink adding say 100 images at a time, processes face recognition etc much faster too & has never crashed. Immich was the driving factor for me to upgrade to the EQ14 & its been great. It also chews through manual backups of Paperless documents in a fraction of the time that it took my Pi4B.

The EQ14 would have no issue whatsoever running Nextcloud. I’ll be adding more self host stuff to it once I find anything else I think will be useful!

I run Nextcloud + Memories plugin on a Pi5 8GB with NVMe with a fanless Argon Neo case. Fast & very stable. One user but it gets quite heavy use.

An alternative you might prefer is a Beelink mini PC which I’m runnin with SSD’s. I went for a Beelink EQ14 which i use for stuff like Paperless & Immich plus several other self host softwares. Picked it up cheap about a year ago before the AI nonsense pushed prices high. Frugal with electricity & more powerful than Pi. Ships with Windows which I ditched for Ubuntu Server. I’ve found it to run like a dream.

I still feel like I’m living in the future using Paperless though I feel I must use it differently to everyone else as i haven’t felt the need to automate everything as it doesn’t always tag things to match my own specific tagging system.

For those that do automate everything, how do you overcome naming of documents? I want the scanned documents to have human readable names rather than the naming format of my scanner (or phone on occasion) or the naming format of XYZ company emailing me a document because in a catastrophe situation I want to be able to easily find & retreive vital/important .pdf docs from a backup rather than having to think about replacing equipment to set up Paperless again (in my instance aside from nightly Kopia snapshot backups I also export Paperless backups on device plus a secondary backup is automatically moved to a separate drive on my network & a third copy is encrypted & stored off site).

I too use Nextcloud & Joplin on all my machines. I also have LocalSend on desktops & phone as another option for quickly firing something over. Because I’m a nerd I also keep a copy of LocalSend portable on my keyring flash drive “just in case I need it” (I’ll almost certainly never need it).