drhoopoe

Yep, I’ve got a stack of 5-10 year old optiplexes (optiplexi?) running proxmox.

I’m a college professor in the humanities (religious studies, history). Got into linux about 5 years back, partly because it comports better with my lefty politics than the alternatives, but also just because I’ve long been a closet computer nerd. I currently run a couple of proxmox servers on old optiplexes I grabbed off ebay. Full *arr stack with jellyfin on docker, a Tails VM for TOR stuff, NAS (omv on a vm), some other dockerized stuff: linkding, radicale, alexandrite (a self-hosted lemmy client, which I’m currently writing this on), various backup utilities.

It’s basically just a hobby for me, though the switch to linux has also totally changed my academic workflow, e.g. I do all my writing in nvim + latex now, use syncthing to sync my home desktop, laptops, and office computer, etc. I dig divesting myself from corporate computing to the greatest extent possible, appreciate the privacy benefits, and generally just enjoy the community-driven spirit of the whole thing.

I mostly use debian + docker or alpine + docker for this kind of thing (usually running as VMs on a proxmox server). Both are utterly reliable in my experience, though I’ve been tending more often toward alpine these days, because it’s just so light and simple. I haven’t tried any of the immutable systems, in the general spirit of why fix what’s not broken. I don’t even bother with snapshotting either, though that’s mostly because I use some of the proxmox tools for backing up the VMs.

I love linkding, couldn’t live without it.

It can be set up to work with a webdav database. So yes, you could self-host the database and access it from clients with local zotero installs.