Currently, we’re just using Google Keep, since it at least supports syncing, sharing, and checklists, but I’m hoping to find something more privacy friendly, and/or more feature rich. In particular, what I’m looking for, in order of priority, are as follows:
- Doesn’t need to be self-hosted
- Lists that can be shared and synced across users and devices
- Basic Checklist functionality
- Reminders, ideally with options to repeat until complete or similar
- Automation, such as automatically recurring events, esspecially recurring after date of completion
- Private storage of user data, or at least better than Google
- Hierarchy and other sorting methods
- Sync to calendars, ideally Proton
I recommend you to take a look into Single Board Computers (SBCs) like Raspberry Pi, Orange Pi, Le Potato, Rock64, etc. They are very capable of hosting most things that ordinary people use, at the scale of a family. There are many guides online on how to make a personal VPN of it, as well as host things directly on it like your own private file share and sync.
I do have an old mini-pc with an AMD A10 in it. Do you think that might work? If so, what sort of software (particularly OS) should I be running on it, since even with its current Kubuntu install, it really struggles to run YouTube?
I’d recommend either Peppermint OS or Lubuntu as lightweight distros for an old laptop. There are many more distros that you can try out there, even without desktop environments (no graphical stuff, which saves a lot of resources), if you’re not into using your laptop for stuff outside of server-use. For that, Debian is the go-to imho. Just remember not to select any desktop environment during the installation process.
Put some of the distros on a flash drive and try them out. Distro hopping can be fun :-)
Can confirm, as I’ve got my home assistant on a 6 year old raspberry pi 4. it is just sitting in a closet, not even on ethernet i’ll admit that i do have a router with openwrt, and that made it super easy to set up a wireguard server