You could also go the extra step, and only have local automations in the home :) home assistant + choosing products well enables total local smarthome stuff. Although I don’t have a robot vacuum.

All my services are self hosted too. Obviously there are limitations: I don’t have fancy voice assistants like Alexa of the likes. But on the flip side I don’t have spies in the house (well, there are… The android phones, and the windows and Mac computers…)

I will definitely give it a try. Thanks for the update and the presentation!

To be honest I prefer option 2 to option 1. However I like to separate my Nas and my app server. VM might be enough of a speration, but here are two other options:

3 - A powerful minipc for the apps + a cheaper one for the nas

4 - two powerful enough computers,both having the Nas and the app, for redundancy.