Synchthing if I want local copies, otherwise I just mount sshfs shares from my nas (using sftpman as a helper)

you will have to spend a lot of time learning the Nix language

I’d say you shouldn’t use any system (be it nixos, ansible or even bash scripts) if you are not willing to learn it.

That said, I too find pre-made modules less useful that I initially thought when I got into nixos: unless you want to do very basic stuff, a lot of times it’s easier to just generate whatever scripts/configuration files you need directly (using one of the trivial builders in lib or writing a custom derivation) rather than learning how the corresponding nixos module works.

One could say nixos modules make easy things slightly easier, and hard things much harder (this is adapted - possibly imprecisely - from a quote on ORMs, I think by Joel Spolsky).

In your shoes (and, in fact, in mine) I’d try to move away from interactive tools and into file-driven ones.

Personally I use nixos, run WUD (what’s up docker) to be notified of available updates, and manually test/update the containers once in a while (every couple weeks or so?)

There are a bazillion other solutions (from stuff like ansible/chef/puppet, to docker-compose, to kubernetes, to… a hand-written bash script) - the idea is to setup stuff via files that you can version, reference and write comments in rather than using some gui for interactive steps that you’ll forget to document in some wiki.

Monitoring is a whole different beast than configuring: you’ll be probably better off using something that does just that instead of some all-in-one solution. Try looking into something like beszel before going for the full prometheus/graphana stack.

Does https://www.olivetin.app/ look like what you have in mind?

(OT) what did you use to annotate the picture?

I’ve not looked into it much yet, but https://radicle.xyz/ seems interesting.

It’s kinda a bittorrent-powerd codeberg and it looks like it’s worth playing around with (even though it might not get you rid of much bandwidth… IDK how popular it is, but source usually doesn’t weigh that much).