My record is 63 days, interrupted by power outage due to electrical problems in the house. I barely did maintenance on it during that period. It's more of a home server than a homelab at this point.

Low power, consumer grade hardware. That's the only thing I can think of.

I wonder how many homelabbers pay the difference between their used server hardware and new consumer hardware every couple of years due to their electricity bill.

• The overall enshittification of online digital services.
• The fact that I was at the mercy of multiple companies and my ISP to turn on/off my smart devices connected to my LOCAL network
• The fact that I was paying for spotify just to play the same few hundred songs, most of which I'd already purchased in the past. Same thing for Disney+ and the kids shows my nephews watch.
• The company that provided the password manager I used got hacked
• I was using a digital assistant with an always-on microphone as a glorified timer.

That's just off the top of my head.

I started out with a RPI, but the hardware needs of my use cases quickly outgrew what the rpi4 8gb could provide for processing power, video decoding, system memory and connectivity. It was still a great way of discovering which services I wanted to host as well as what hardware I'd need for them, for a relatively low cost. I'd say go for it, but keep in mind that it may not be enough in the long run

Initially it was about the journey, now I find myself needing to migrate about half of the software I run into a stable environment. Really didn't expect self-hosted FOSS software to be so competitive with paid cloud solutions feature-wise, not going back to paying for subscriptions.

Sever oriented Linux distros are designed with server workflows and high availability in mind. Desktop Windows isn't. However, if you're not running mission critical services, who cares? Do whatever is the most practical to you.