Almost a year ago, I set up a tiny homelab on an Intel NUC running Arch Linux. The original goal was fairly modest: run a few self-hosted services for personal use — Plex, Nextcloud, qBittorrent and Bitwarden.

I deliberately avoided Kubernetes. Even though k3s is perfectly capable of running on low-end hardware, I did not want to introduce another layer of complexity into a setup that was supposed to remain small and maintainable. Docker Compose felt more than enough for a single-node environment.