I apologize for my ignorance when it comes to Kubernetes - I sort of wrote it off as complete overkill for a home lab when my very basic understanding was that it was essentially a load balancer. After some light research, I’m beginning to understand that it could be a better solution than a full-blown hypervisor.
If I understand your comment correctly, you’re suggesting to simply run a lightweight distro and install k0s or k3s to run containers? What would be an ideal bare metal OS for this? What would be pros/cons to k0s vs k3s in a home lab environment, or is that simply a matter of personal preference? What would be the best way to connect to my media - SMB, NFS, something else? Or are the differences here irrelevant? Any concerns (permissions, IO latency) when passing an NFS mount from host into a container, or is there an even better way to do something like that entirely within the container?