I’m building almost exactly this as an N150 box, so take this with that bias. For photos, files and contacts, Immich plus Nextcloud on Debian will cover you, and an N-series board idles at a few watts. The part that bit me was updates breaking things, not the install. What’s your limit for maintenance, an hour a month?

I’m designing around an Intel N150, and this thread is the reason. These chips idle in single digits with an SSD, so most of the cost of running always-on goes away. The catch is the 16GB RAM ceiling on most boards, which caps how much local AI you can run on it. For the low-watt folks: what did you give up to get there, and was it worth it?

Calling it ad blocking undersells it. The ad network is the delivery path in that report, so blocking at DNS is a security layer, not tidiness. The thing I’m building goes a step further: it holds tracker connections open instead of refusing them, so they waste their own time instead of retrying instantly. Has anyone tried tarpitting at home? I’m curious whether it broke smart TVs or apps that phone home hard.

Yes, but the gift isn’t the hardware. It’s that it keeps working when you’re not around to fix it. So I’d go boring: plain Debian, Cockpit for storage and containers, and a WireGuard web UI. Before you hand it over, unplug the internet for a day and see what breaks. DNS usually goes first. I’m building an open-source home box around the same idea (GPLv3 once it ships), and your question is the one I keep chewing on: what makes a partner actually use it instead of just tolerating it?