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.