This is they way. At least in the US where these things are very cheap. In my country you need to bee very lucky to even find the old ones for under $150…

Proxmox cluster. And you can run all your services in LXC containers instead. And not have to bother with docker? And have cetralized storage to your NAS?

Lucky you. These are fun machines!

I lived in a dorm room at uni. And we didn’t pay for electricity in the common areas. One christmas they turned off the heating for some reson. I got so frustrated I turned on the ovens in the kitchen and opened them up to heat the kitchen/living area. Which worked. But it was probably not cheap for them after a few days :)

Some kind of photo management and backup system. I never went the Google Photos route and am now very happy with using Synology Photos and doing backups of my entire diigital life with Synology Hyperbackup. Works great even when NOT exposing it to the internet.

And of course Jellyfin for media streaming.