I’ve been self-hosting Matrix for like 2+ years now. The setup yaml was a lot to get thru in terms of reading what each set of options did. That felt like a lot but the reality was only a few things actually needed to be set and/or changed to make it work the way I wanted. Thankfully Matrix documented all the options out.
Overall, I’m extremely happy with Matrix. It has very much been set it and forget it once it was up. I’m excited to see where Matrix 2.0 goes.
This right here. get something cheap, throw opnsense or pfsense on it and start learning. It will probably be incredibly frustrating at first but when it starts to click then it is really fun and rewarding.
I bought an old dell r210ii years ago and threw pfsense on it then swapped to opnsense and could not be happier. It is still in use today, a good 6 years later.
Tons of the T480 and T480s models are hitting eBay since they seem to be coming off corporate lease. The T480 seems to be a little better if you want to do things like RAM and storage upgrades but both seem like great machines to me. If you want to save a few more bucks, the T460 is also an option. All those Lenovo models are really well supported with Linux if you choose to go that route. Mine came with a copy of windows 11 pre installed, which I promptly removed.
How long did your initial sync take?