Good to know

I use Portainer and it's a good UI, but I find the way they market business edition pretty scummy. Like having a banner ad constantly visible on the page, and having half the features visible but disabled with a big bright "upgrade to Business Edition" message next to them, and directly refusing to add any mechanism to opt out. I respect that they need funding for development, but they need to realize that a lot of their users simply don't need a business license and aren't going to buy one no matter how much advertisement you throw at them. The fact that they don't realize that and refuse to budge indicates to me that they've stopped caring about the user experience of their product.

Sorry for the rant, I've been annoyed by this for a long time. Some day I'll set up my own gitops pipeline, but that pesky day job keeps getting in the way.

It's just a bloated way to manage Docker containers. Plus you can save your compose files through OMV

If you are somewhat comfortable with the cli you could install proxmox as zfs then create datasets off the pool to do whatever you want. If you wanted a nicer gui to manage zfs you could also install cockpit on the proxmox hypervisor directly along with the zfs plugin to manage the datasets and share them a bit easier. Obviously you could do all of that from the command line too.

Personally I use proxmox now where before I made use of Debian. The only reason I switched was it made vm/lxc management easy. As for truenas it's also basically Debian with a different gui. These days I'm more focused on optimization in my home lab journey. I hope you enjoy the experience however you begin and whatever applications you start with.

Nextcloud is good at general cloud features. It's not specialized in photo management. If you're storing memes or cell phone pictures it's fine, but if you use an actual camera that uses a RAW format, you're much better off using Immich.

I use Nextcloud to hold all my personal and important files as well as my wife and I’s shared photo album. I use an old Surface laptop as a digital picture frame and have it on a random loop slideshow of our pictures album on our Nextcloud.

We use the iPhone apps to upload our photos and then it shows up on our frame. Works really well!

I use it, mostly because I wanted to build an analogue to Google Drive/Photos, though it took some work to get it to a point where it felt good. Since the default Photos app feels pretty garbage to me, I installed the Memories app (same thing but better, very like Google photos) as well as Preview Generator & Recognize.

These seem to do the trick. The automated tagging isn't without its issues (pretty janky, frankly), but I'm pretty content with it to the point where I'm not looking to change in a hurry. Haven't tried Immich, though it looks pretty enough like I'd probably just go with it since it does the one task it's supposed to do, but again, I'm comfy and don't feel the need to find a new home for my photos yet.

I've used nextcloud for a while now, but it does suffer from jack of all trades syndrome. I've started offloading the things I use it for to other services that do a particular thing better. Syncthing for general file syncing across my devices, Immich for managing photos, Radicale for contacts and calendar sync...

If you're just looking for an all in one Google Drive like experience for your files though, Nextcloud is as good as it gets.

I have no experience with NC, but the sense i get is yes, once you go that direction, you can do a lot with it.

NC itself is discussable, but desktop/android clients are awesome. Autoupload and files preview without download are great features.

Cups

linux printing server - if you want to share a printer over network or just use one locally on a linux machine.

Instead of wifi printing, my printer is attached directly to my Pi, then Common Unix Print Server/System (later Rebranded Cupertino Print Server when apple took over the project many years later) acts as printer announcement, driver and spooler service.

Custom default settings, speed, and reliability (not IP blacklisted)