There’s a few things that are working well, and others that I haven’t figured out yet or aren’t happy with the set up. Didn’t have issues with Thunderbolt, but haven’t really played around with it.

Good:
- Tailscale is set up which means I can open the Umbrel UI from my computer or phone, even when I’m not at home, which is nice.
- The local Nostr relay is running fine and backing up my notes.
- I’m running a local Snort server, though I’m not really using it in practice as my main go-to is still Damus on desktop and phone.
- Bitcoin Core is fully synced though it’s currently taking up 691 GB of my 1TB drive. I think there’s a way to optionally prune old blocks down to 300 GB or less, though I don’t understand the implications yet.

Bad:
- No matter what I do, I can’t get SSH to work on Tailscale installed via Umbrel. And I believe Vaultwarden (slimmed down Bitwarden) requires it. I think it might work better if Tailscale is installed directly on the machine, but I haven’t tried to figure this out yet.
- The first time I installed Ubuntu, I opted to encrypt the drive. That was a mistake because if restarts unexpectedly, I have no way of getting it back up remotely as I have to unlock the drive physically with the password from the T480. So I had to redo it.
- The second time, I didn’t encrypt the logical partition / folder. Not sure what happens with Umbrel’s start-on-boot process if I do that. But right now, all my data is unencrypted, and that seems bad if I’m going to store passwords, personal photos, and other sensitive files on there.
- I’m considering if I should restart, go full on Linux nerd, and do everything by command line. But then I lose out on Umbrel’s nice UI. I prefer dumbed down interfaces, to be honest, because I’m lazy. 

 That was a very insightful and helpful reply. Thank you so much! 🙏 SATs coming your way. I had Umbrel running on a Pi4 and Start9 also on a Pi4 in an Argon One chassis with internal NVMe SSD. Both worked OK to be honest. No issues with tailscale for the Umbrel but Start9 seems to be more secure as access is via Tor/https after installing certificates. However both seem slow with Bitcoin Core, hence the repurposed T480. I’m a total Linux noob so I think I might just go with start9 to see if I can get it to run smoothly on the T480. But I am also tempted to play with Linux too. Either way I enjoy the tinkering 🙂 Thanks again!