The only one I haven’t seen mentioned here that is a requirement for me is OPNsense. I’ve been using it for a couple years, and pfSense before that for a very long time. Never going back to commercial routers and their shitty / buggy / backdoored software. I highly recommend OPNsense over pfSense for the UI improvements alone, but there are other reasons to use/support OPNsense over pfSense.

On my network it handles internet firewall, internal firewall, and all routing across 5 VLANs and between two internet gateways. It does 1-1 NAT for my public IPs, inbound VPN, outbound VPN for my *arr stack, and RDNS blocklists with the data source being a script I wrote that merges from several sources and deduplicates the list. It is my internal certificate authority (I don’t miss you at all, Windows CA), DHCP for the guest wifi, and does pihole-like ad blocking via DNS for my entire network. And it does all that running in a VM with 2GB of RAM, of which it only uses about 60% on my install.

It is an incredibly powerful tool, not terribly difficult to learn, has a pretty damn good UI for FOSS, and in my opinion is a fantastic foundation for a complex home network / homelab. Unlike pfSense, which corrupted itself twice over the years I ran it, it has never let me down. And every update has been painless over the years.

A reverse proxy, in my case Caddy.

Immich/PhotoPrism/whatever you use for image backup. Cloud providers are snooping through your shit.

Plex/Jellyfin for streaming

Sonarr, Radarr, Prowlarr, SABnzbd, qBittorrent to support the streaming service(s)

Jellyfin/Plex like many have mentioned.

I personally like Syncthing for petty much everything else. For general file syncing of course. But also with Joplin pointed to a synced directory for notes. With keepass as a password vault. With synced config directories for some apps across devices like newsboat for RSS, and neomutt for email. I also used to use it with rtorrent via a watch directory, though I currently am using a seedbox for that purpose.

VPN (openvpn/wireguard) is a good idea if you want to access your services outside your local network, without exposing them all globally.

For me, the most essentials are definitely:

• PhotoPrism
• Jellyfin
• Navidrome
• Wiki.js

My most frequently used are most likely vaultwarden, Memos, Trilium, Jellyfin, Frigate, Traggo, and beaverhabits. Also AdGuard and NPM but I don’t interact with them.

Oh yeah and freshrss

And! Nextcloud and Baikal. NC only for storage and Baikal caldav and carddav

vaultwarden, jellyfin, freshrss, nextcloud, and wireguard

It’s not very exciting, but: Network UPS Tools (NUT).

Keep everything in good shape in the event of a power outage.

Depends on the situation of course, but for us:

• immich: family photos are important
• docker + ssh: we enjoy hobbying with code, nerds be nerds
• samba: a file sharing protocol that works on all of our things

Audiobookshelf, Calibre-Web, Plex/Jellyfin, FreshRSS, NextCloud, DokuWiki.

Gitea, wger, jellyfin, samba, *arr stack, jellyseer

Plex, channels, mail, calendar, contacts, wiki

Docker