How well NixOS fits your purpose really depends on what you want to do with the OS. If you’re just going run a bunch of docker containers, you could manage them via Nix but its a little cumbersome.

Where NixOS really shines for small servers are the so called NixOS Options. They allow you to install tons of services on bare metal but manage all the configuration for you. E.g. open the correct firewalls ports, run a dedicated DB or cache, etc. and all those simply require you to enable them with an ... = true;.

Smaller projects might not have a NixOS Option available and some options are more and/or easier configurable than others, but if you’re running just a few common services you could feasibly manage your whole server with just one native config file and no docker shenanigans.

I’d recommend checking what’s available under the link above. If you wanna go the container route instead, you have the option of just using docker non-declaratively as on every other distro (but then you lose some of the benefits NixOS gives you), or you can declaratively have NixOS manage all the docker containers. There are a few ways to do and manage this so some further research will be required.

Indeed

Then helmfile might be worth checking out

You dont need to manually handle the WG config files. This isn’t really an issue when it’s just you and your two devices, but once you start supporting more people, like non-technical family members, this gets really annoying really quickly.

Tailscale (and headscale) just require you to log in, which even those family members can manage and then does the rest for you. They also support SSO in which case you wouldn’t even have to create new accounts.

There are some experimental models made specifically for use with Home Assistant, for example home-llm.

Even though they are tiny 1-3B I’ve found them to work much better than even 14B general purpose models. Obviously they suck for general purpose questions just by their size alone.

That being said they’re still LLMs. I like to keep the “prefer handling commands locally” option turned on and only use the LLM as a fallback.

Why not set up backups for the Proxmox VM and be done with it?

Also makes it easy to add offsite backups via the Proxmox Backup Server in the future.