NixOS is awesome!

That sex isn't love.

Regarding your third point, you might find it helpful to search for beginners' guides whenever starting a new project. One thing that people don't seem to tell new users about is the struggles they faced when getting started themselves. Countless thousands of hours could be spent on this before someone decides to get started, while others pick it up in a much shorter timeframe. It just depends on you and what you are looking to get out of it.

It's much more difficult than many people realize. If you need a space to test things out, I'd recommend installing VirtualBox with a couple of VMs to host whatever services you decide on. You can take a snapshot of the VM at any point in time, so when things go bad, you can simply restore whichever snapshot you like.

1. Control and privacy. The server does exactly what I choose, not somebody's business model.
2. Once you have other users, it's not a hobby anymore. People are not amused by downtime.
3. The w3schools.com tutorials have been good for me.

1. Things like changes to TOS or services can be seriously mitigated by hosting it yourself. WHat happens if Spotify changes the music they host or inserts ads into everything. Well for me, nothing. On the flip side, if some of my stuff goes down, kids and wife will bark. But honestly its mostly set it and forget it.

2. KISS is a thing that applies to many things in life. Anything "smart" in your home should ideally function without your "smart" features working. Ie: light switches should be dumb light switches if something breaks etc etc. Also dont get caught in using rack or enterprise gear. You can learn just as much using smaller, fatter desktops with bigger fans and air cooling over a power hungry rack servers with 80mm fans that blow your eardrums out. My entire lab runs on old dell workstations and raspberry pis'

3. https://www.servethehome.com/ -