Guide
A shortlist for 32-bit ARM systems, plus the newer options a 64-bit Pi can consider. Check the actual architecture test result before choosing a recipe.
Use reliable power and move databases and frequently written state off the boot SD card when possible. A USB SSD improves the storage arrangement; it does not remove the need for an off-device backup.
The shortlist below keeps its armv7 filter for older or 32-bit installations. On a 64-bit OS, Beszel, Homepage, ntfy and Memos offer additional arm64 image options. Their current recipe checks ran on amd64, so plan an isolated ARM trial before depending on them.
Pick a few services and leave headroom for the system, scans and history. Avoid treating media transcoding or large model inference as a default Pi workload. Verify your client and storage behavior on the actual board; the catalog’s CPU, disk and RAM figures describe declared requirements, not a board-specific benchmark.
Sets
The sum of the minimums the recipes below declare. It is a floor, not a recommendation: leave room for the operating system, backups and growth.
Why it is here: The classic reason to own a Pi. It answers DNS for the whole house on 256 MB, and a board dedicated to it keeps the household's internet independent of whatever else you are experimenting with.
Why it is here: An alternative DNS filter for the household. Follow the documented DNS port and network configuration, plan a fallback resolver, and do not publish an open resolver to the internet.
Why it is here: A Pi makes a good always-on sync peer: it is the device that never sleeps, so the laptop and the phone find each other through it. Watch the file count rather than the file size.
Why it is here: Music streams straight from the disk with no re-encoding, which is exactly the workload a Pi is good at. Expect the first library scan to take a while on an SD card.
Why it is here: A monitor is worth more on separate hardware than on the machine it watches, and a Pi is the cheapest separate hardware there is.
Why it is here: A light configuration-driven availability monitor. A Pi separate from the main server gives the checks a different failure domain; keep its power and network dependencies in mind.
Why it is here: A small automation runtime with an authenticated editor. Flows and stored credentials are sensitive; preserve the data and credential secret together.
Why it is here: Small enough to share a board with everything else here, and valuable enough to be the one service you back up off the Pi on a schedule.
Why it is here: Polling feeds is periodic, light work that fits a small board well. The archive is the part that grows, so keep it on external storage rather than on the boot card.