I've been wanting to get matrix up for my family and friends to chat with my 6 year old on her tablet. I found nextcloud talk to do all the things I wanted with none of the hassle. My daughter is a ridiculous texter.
Your approach works too. Something like CasaOS answers OP's question directly. I was thinking about how I started on this journey. I wanted to play with enterprise level tools at home on repurposed e-waste. So I started with proxmox. But I also came to the table with a couple decades of Linux experience under my belt.
Those scripts make it so easy. You can paste a command, accept defaults, watch some text scroll by and finish with instructions on how to access the tool you just installed.
My homelab is low power as well. I'm currently running zero VMs. Everything is done with LXCs. You can run a pi hole on 512 MB RAM.
I'm a regular ass taxpayer trying to feed my family. I do what I can to protect privacy. I use a VPN, self host whatever I can, shit like that. I can't stop driving to work so I can avoid cameras.
Lemmy does a good enough job of bringing content to me. But I appreciate your perspective. It's definitely something to keep in mind as we get closer to the AI apocalypse.
This is so foreign to me. I never bookmark anything ever. I leave a few tabs open until I complete that task, read that article or decide I don't care anymore.
Take an old PC or laptop out of the box-o-crap, install Ubuntu server, give it a fixed IP address, install pi hole with the one line command from their website, tell your regular PC that the laptop IP is your DNS server.
This is the easiest way to play around before rolling out to your whole network.
I haven't installed it direct on my router. I used to have it running in a container on my little proxmox server (aka old PC repurposed). I really liked the interface.
Then I was practically gifted a really nice Asus router. I flashed merlin-wrt to it and read some guide on how to install a different ad blocker. It's really good whatever it is. I haven't had to touch it in months, and I never see an ad.
I think they would fall in the less resources category. But they offer unlimited data transfer, and you can use any distro you want. I run slackware btw.
I build from ewaste and keep things deliciously trashy looking.