I am not a Linux guy. But I am in the process of running my own node. I do like to do all from the source and though they’re more plug and play, I just want to start maybe with a mini pc (don’t like the raspberry pi with the ssd cable connected outside), the bitcoin.org core for a start. Could you advise the essential plus tools I should consider to install so I can confirm my btc transactions and privacy. Basically I am just a hodler. Thanks #asknostr 

 After playing around with several tools, I settled on the following:

Bitcoin Core - https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin
Fulcrum - https://github.com/cculianu/Fulcrum
Mempool.space - https://github.com/mempool/mempool
Alby Hub - https://github.com/getAlby/hub

This gives me the bare minimum (node, electrum server, blockchain explorer, and lightning node). 

I had a full LND node running for a while but managing it became a pain, so I shut it down and went with Alby Hub instead. 

 Thanks for sharing. And what about hardware. What do you use as hardware? 

 Raspberry Pi 4 with a usb3 ssd attached. The new Pi 5s have better support for NVME drives, so you don’t need the external drive anymore. I haven’t felt the need to update the hardware though - the 4 is powerful enough for personal use (I wouldn’t try running a public electrum server on it, but for private use it works fine) 

 How many gb ram and ssd disk? 

 8G ram and 480G SSD. I use a second 3T spinning drive to store the blocks since they don’t need to be on a fast drive - only the indexes and chainstate. The blocks folder is a symlink to the slower (and larger) drive. 

This works because core doesn’t do random I/O on the blocks - they are written and read sequentially, so a regular hard drive works fine.