[fuball63]

I am technical and I struggle to find a use for my home server. The most common uses I always find are:

- Media server: I primarily use streaming services or physical media

- File sharing: I rarely ever share files between computers, and if I need to, I just scp them on my home network.

- Web hosting: box is too small/old to reliably do this, plus I have cloud hosting already

I do use it for private SVN and have plans to set up a VPN server, but other than that, it feels like unless I cast off every existing service I have, it wouldn't be worth it.

Although, casting off every existing service is enticing in an idealistic sort of way...

[aylmao]

I think the key would be to embed it to some existing appliance; like a router, game console, or other "always-on" and connected device.

I don't see the home server being the prime selling point. Everyone needs a router, so if you created a router that was dead simple to configure and use, had some cool extra features, integrated well with your home gadgets ("Alexa, turn off the WiFi", "Alexa, setup a guest wifi network for the next 8 hours") and on top of this acted like a home server, people would buy it.

At least from a consumer product perspective.

[qznc]

The router I got from my ISP already has quite some stuff built in. For example, I can enable DynDNS, plug in a drive via USB providing a SMB network drive, and enable a secondary guest WiFi.

[hex-m]

I agree that the killer feature is still missing. That could maybe be storage-management (NAS) or HTPC (Kodi). People seem to buy such devices.

On the other hand there are nice features already: VPN Server, Seedbox, Ad-blocking-proxy

[pnutjam]

I have a home box that I access with x2go. I can browse the internet, download stuff, or do whatever I want without touching the office network. I can disconnect a session and reconnect from a different pc.

I also have my server configured to route out via a vpn.

[piracykills]

Looking for a way to do better remote access to Linux boxes - Microsoft's RDP completely nails it on Windows, I used to quite like NX, but don't hear much about it these days, how do you find x2go, particularly from a server configuration perspective?

[pnutjam]

X2go is super easy to use, pretty much install and go. You need a client, I've used the linux and windows client. Both work well. I think you can make their python client work without windows admin rights, but it's been awhile since I tried that.

I browse websites with it, and unless it's very image heavy, it's as smooth as a local browser. If you have large images, scrolling can get choppy. Same with videos, they can be choppy.

[qznc]

I've set up a homeserver for more than a year now. The only real use is being my always running SyncThing instance.