I use nextcloud to sync our photos, with the memory's add-on and mobile app you can even have collections.

I use swarm in my home lab, I don't have any docker things at work so Kubernetes is way more then I want to manage.

All my stacks are in a git repo, I have an ansible playbook to update them if needed. I also have most things tracked on new releases (https://newreleases.io/) so I know when something needs an update, then I can either update the git repo by hand or use ansible.

Also have a look at docker contexts, you can manage your swarm from a remote location.

OMG, thats a lot of things to connect to. installing Symfonium now to have a look

So I need to make a VPS setup script to install bind for DNS and wireguard or openvpn and push it to gitlab/GitHub?

It is very simple, I run it from docker and it can plug into all sorts of places, I have nginx config that I could share if it helps.

This is the tool https://oauth2-proxy.github.io/oauth2-proxy/

well the work they did to allow for faster updates has paid off in spades, sterling job to them

Linux has been ready for ARM for a long time, Android is linux and have been running for a long time. Also see the Raspberry Pi and PiOS, based on Debian.

I run a Pi and there are boat loads of things ARM ready

me remembering I caused an outage yesterday by deleting nginx config 🤦‍♂️

I think your missing the point of HAOS, it's an appliance. You don't manage it like a normal self host system.

Once you treat it as an appliance, it's great. Also there is a portainer agent you can run that will connect to a portainer instance.

As for your tunnel issues, maybe the tunnel thing is your biggest issue. I run all my self host stuff on its own subdomain, if I want to route something home I use the site to site VPN I have. Even a cheap ovh vps could be a way to run stuff on subdomains

that looks to be almost all steaming services adding an ad-supported option, you now pay to not have ads.

Back to the high sea's to watch anything then

I do this, 1 compose file per application. That has all the things that application need, volumes, networks, secrets.

In single docker host land, each application even has its own folder with the compose file and any other artifacts in it.

also Ubuntu will add more complexity to things, Debian will cover most of what you need.