For anyone passionate about digital sovereignty and homelabbing, setting up a private home server on a Single Board Computer (like a Raspberry Pi 5, Orange Pi) or a Proxmox home lab is one of the most rewarding engineering projects.
However, anyone who has managed a growing homelab knows the friction that comes with it:
Writing and debugging endless docker-compose.yml files with conflicting port mappings, network subnets, and missing environment variables.
Heavy all-in-one platforms (CasaOS, Umbrel, Cosmos, etc.) that install bloated background web servers, daemons, and proprietary agents on your target hardware, hogging precious RAM and CPU cycles.
Cloud lock-in and AI privacy leaks: Newer DevOps tools often require subscriptions or send internal infrastructure topology and credentials to proprietary US cloud APIs.
