I have 2 questions:

Do I understand the colors correctly in that /home is deprecated and shouldn’t be used? What’s the alternative in that case?

Where would you guys put configuration files for services? /srv seems like an adequate directory

Honestly, what else would it be? Text takes ridiculously little storage compared to a single picture of a decent resolution.

Depends I guess. For me the biggest concern when I bought my Synology was simplicity of usage and idle power consumption which is much lower than I could get with one of the older computers I have lying around.

I am currently using 2 16TB drives in Raid 1 and was planning to move to Raid 5 (or maybe it was 6) if I need more storage by adding a 3rd drive.

What would you recommend instead?

Well, theoretically yes but it doesn’t continuously send data and both WiFi and Zigbee also allow for operation on various channels. Does your neighbors WiFi interfere with yours?

Also, most WiFi devices now support 5GHz WiFi anyway so it’s even less of an issue anymore. The bigger problem would probably be WiFi interfering with ZigBee. But again, that can be resolved by changing the channels.

Isn’t Zigbee always on 2.4GHz regardless of country? Trying to shift the frequency to 915MHz for all devices sounds like a lot of work with questionable benefit

That’s a good point. Another one I have is sort of failure tolerance. I used to have a really unreliable router which would often crash and could only be reset using a full power reset. While it was in this state, wifi obviously stopped working but my zigbee devices where still available. I used to have a zigbee button linked to a smart plug for toggling my router off and on again.

This shouldn’t be a concern for most people obviously but I wanted to share my experience.

Another point I want to mention is that zigbee works at 2.4Ghz just like basic wifi so they can still interfere with each other.

Zwave on the other hand uses another frequency (I think it was around 860MHz) but is more expensive.

Performance is good and streaming works well. Not a fan of the webinterface personally but there are client programs available for all platforms since navidrome exposes the subsonic api.

Personally I use sonix on windows and linux as well as symfonium (paid but really great app) on android.

The only thing I am missing from it is better user management so that I can restrict specific users from accessing parts of my library.

Regarding access from outside my network I specifically wanted to avoid needing to be connected to a VPN so that’s why I use a cloudflare tunnel. Since my upload rate is not very good I have a Pi-Hole DNS server at home so that queries to my domain while in the home network don’t need to leave my network.

+1 for navidrome.

I’m also using that and have it exposed to the web using a cloudflare tunnel. What I didn’t like in the beginning but really appreciate now is that the service itself doesn’t have a lot of permissions and cannot delete files or change their metadata. I’m hosting it in a docker container and everything except the config file is mounted read-only.

I’m not sure how relevant that is but it gives me more peace of mind exposing it publicly.

Running a webserver is not the same as hosting a service. For the software examples requested by OP, an ESP32 is useless

I think the Pi 4 was the first Pi with gigabit ethernet. All the Pi’s before that were limited to 100Mbit. For that reason, syncthing is probably a bad idea since it will be very slow in terms of syncing speed