Psychologist by training, production planner by trade. I started using Linux around 15 years ago on my laptop. My self hosted journey started with a Chromecast plugged in a TV and I would cast file from my laptop. Fed up on how laggy and buggy the set up was I installed Kodi on my laptop. Then, I bought a SBC and a few years later a refurbished NUC for few bucks.
I now selfhost around 10 services but nothing too complex (jellyfin, grocy, paperless, etc). I know how to set up a docker image and thinker a bit with config files but I rely heavily on guides for tasks more complex than that. There are a few services that I would like to setup but as I get older I get less joy from setting up a system than using it and the hours I can invest on this are unfortunately limited.
My potato server died a few months ago and since I'll be moving shortly I'm not rebuilding it right know. So I bought a simple intel nuc, slapped an old HDD inside and connected to the TV.
Jellyfin runs in the the background but I access it throght Kodi. Jellyfin is accessed directly only if my wife want to watch something from her study.
This. If you can live without icons and widget it's one of the best.
There is also mLauncher, a forked version of olauncher.
I started to use showly oss a while ago. It's similar to IMDb but uses trakt as a backend.
Still a bit too early in development for me but it's really promising