Every single time I talk to my friends, whom also want an *arr/Plex/VPN/Home Assistant setup like I’ve got, I can see the fear in their eyes when I mention Debian, Docker, and the terminal. It could be a case of “git gud”, but I want to help them out with a setup like this, but with as low friction as possible. Ideally something completely GUI based, and very low maintenance.
I know of unRAID, and Portainer, but does anyone have any experience in setting up something like this for people whose knowledge of self hosting and networking aren’t as good as yours?
I have a couple friends like this over the past few years that I just built their server and taught them how to install updates on the terminal (or write a maintenance script for them to run) and how to open a port if I need to fix something remotely and it has been great.
Also, Depending on the user once it’s set up I usually recommend either Portainer or Cockpit are more than enough with watchtower to keep things up to date. If that is too much I usually just suggest a Synology/qnap or TrueNAS/unRAID for roll your own.
ETA: Cockpit also has a web based terminal and can execute package manager updates as well.