This isn't always the answer. There are people who need to use macOS because, e.g., they need to build macOS apps. Even simple building tools such as Python's setuptools or py2app requires you to be on Mac in order to build for Mac.
What are your devices? If you have Apple only, Books already does everything you need, and you need no self-hosting.
Disclaimer: I live in Europe, so my house's walls are made of bricks and mortar, no plasterboard to easily cut / patch up.
I have a room that is generally cooler than the rest of my home and it's also far away from my bedroom, so I setup my home lab there. Until now, I managed with WiFi, but I switched operators due to soaring prices and I got screwed since the download / upload speed on this one is kinda shitty. Hence, I want to pass LAN cables from my home lab to my home office, which would mean going through two rooms or, correspondingly, two doors. Since it's my property, I thought of cutting a couple of centimeters from the door frame and then lead the cables through a skirting board and then through the space cut up from the door frame. What do you think? Any other idea?
Some of you may remember a poll about NASs I recently opened here on the sub. The background was that my HP ProDesk 600 G1 SFF turned into NAS finally failed. Now, I did some diagnostics and it seems to be a motherboard problem. However, I don't really want to repair it, so I will gut it for usable parts and recycle the rest. The reason behind it is that it was a power-hungry mofo, idleing at 20-25w. Hence, now that I have the chance I'd like to upgrade to something much more energy efficient, idleing at < 10w. I am currently looking into tiny HPs and Dells, since they are cheap to get off Amazon as refurbished machines (< 150€) and seem to idle in that watt range. What do you think? TY in advance.
I feel like this is much more than many people on here are ready to undertake.
Also, homelab is a kinda vague designation, so it stops being one when you say so. I know people who call homelabs their NAS running a couple of containers, so go crazy.