I think it's bad to invent new words for "stopped container"

You're not wrong!

Orphans are just dangling objects, are they not?

I'm only using the Unraid Docker GUI to send me utilization alerts and notify me when my images are egregiously out of date. I saw someone trying to author a compose file using the GUI once and I closed the window before the headache started.

I'm not paying $3/mo. Where'd you get that idea? I think I paid $20 for a license like 6 years ago.

I picked Unraid because I had a bunch of disparate HDDs sitting around and their filesystem intrigued me. (0 data loss after 3 drive failures so far.)

running out of disk space

This would be my first guess. Nothing shuts down arbitrary services quite like a full /var/logs.

There were video games, too.

I'm running an Unraid server. You can pop in and manage everything with the CLI like you would on traditional server OSes and it'll show your containers, images, orphans etc. in the GUI and throws alerts out of the box for utilization thresholds and power events. It's quite nice at a glance and gets the fuck out of the way the moment it's time to be a sysadmin.

Unraid brings some good things to the table, I wouldn't discount it completely.

I have a Raspberry Pi 4B as my load bearing Mac mini.

Use containers. Start with one device. Check your utilization after you're sure you've hit min and max for each of your services, then figure out if your single device can handle all your services gunning at once. If not, take your biggest service and migrate it to its own device.

Eventually, you might find yourself googling "Kubernetes vs Docker Swarm." When you do that, take a deep breath and decide if upgrading one device is easier than trying to horizontally scale many.

Edit: Words bad. Verbs hard.

An UPS is a must for any computer, even if all it's doing is absorbing the shock of a brownout and triggering a graceful shutdown.

I run persistent services that require 24/7 uptime.

That depends on what you want your experience to be. I run a teeny instance, don't give a shit about a Twitter-like experience, and am happy getting content only from my direct follows. It's great!

If you're expecting a deluge of bullshit from randos, definitely go register at one of the big ones instead!

You should check out the app directory at Selfh.st. There are a bunch of selfhosted solutions for what you're looking for, be they all in one or micro services.

Fuck, I lost!

Hey, I was in a similar situation at that inflection point but veered into PHP application development and couldn't quite get away from the front end. Let me tell you: CSS Flexbox and Grid are amazing. AlpineJS is "just the good parts" of jQuery. You can go back now. Check out 11ty.