Depending on how you build it, you could run homeassistant next to your smb, which lends itself to all sorts of add-ons such as calibre-web for displaying eBooks and synchronizing progress.

Of course, gitea and surroundings, or similar ci/cd can be a fun thing to dabble with if you aren't totally over that from work.

Another fun idea is to run the rapidly developing immich as a photo storage solution. But in general, the best inspiration is the awesome-selfhosted list.

Running a home server seems relatively popular for all kinds of things. Search term "homelab" brings up a culture of people who seem largely IT-adjacent, prefer retired DC equipment, experiment with network configurations as a means of professional development and insist on running everything in VMs. Search term "self-hosted", on the other hand, seems to skew towards an enterprise of saturating a Raspberry Pi's CPU with half-hearted and unmaintained Python clones of popular SaaS products. In my experience — with both hardware and software vendoring — there is a bounty of reasonable options somewhere in between the two.

I use mine for a ton:

- Home Assistant

- GitHub backups

- Self-hosting personal projects

- File sync

- golink service

- freshrss RSS reader

- Media server

- Alternative frontends for reddit/youtube

- GitHub Actions runners

- Coder instance

- Game servers (Minecraft, Factorio)

Admittedly, this is more of a project for fun than for the end result. You could achieve all of the above by paying for services or doing something else.

https://github.com/shepherdjerred/homelab/tree/main/src/cdk8...

People want all kinds of things besides literal SMB shares:

- Other network protocols (NFS, ftp, sftp, S3)

- Apps that need bulk storage (e.g., Plex, Immich)

- Syncthing node

- SSH support (for some backup tools, for rsync, etc)

- You're already running a tiny Linux box in your home, so maybe also Pihole / VPN server / host your blog?

You've got compute attached to storage, and people find lots of ways to use that. Synology even has an app store.

I'm running Truenas Scale on my old i7 3770 with 16GB DDR3.

Obviously got a bunch of datasets just for storage, one for time machine backups over the network and then dedicated ones for apps.

I'm using for almost all my self hosted apps.

Home Assistant, Plex, Calibre, Immich, Paperless NGX, Code Server, Pi-Hole, Syncthing and a few others.

I've got Tailscale on it and I'm using a convenience package called caddy-reverse-proxy-cloudflare to make my apps available on subdomains of my personal domain (which is on CloudFlare ) by just adding labels to the docker containers.

And since I'm putting the Tailscale address as the DNS entry on CloudFlare, they can only be accessed by my devices when they're connected to Tailscale.

I think at this point what's amazing is the ease with which I can deploy new apps if I need something or want to try something.

I can have Claude whip up a docker compose and deploy it with Dockge.

There's a range. A lot of people treat their NAS as their home server - torrents, downloads, media server, even containers and everything that goes with it.

I played with it as well - it's fun and rewarding and potentially optimized, but also... Can be a lot of work and hassle.

For myself when I say turn key solution, I should specify that I'm also doing more of a "right specific device for specific purpose ", so my NAS is now a storage device and nothing else.

I personally don't get what they are serving with a home NAS? Movies/Music/Family Photos is all I can think of, personally...and those don't seem that compelling to me compared to cloud.

Not much more, but the extra bits probably differ for different people.

My (Synology) NAS also serves as a Time Machine backup and hosts an LDAP backend for my.

I'm hosting a couple of apps in Docker on mine. (Pihole, Jellyfin, Audiobookshelf, and Bitwarden.)

I run NFS and Postgres to enable multiple-machine video editing.