Vpn, nas, home assistant, dns, reverse proxy, adblocker, specialty controller units, misc project vms/containers.

It’s a container service. Containers are similar to virtual machines but less separate from the host system. Docker excels in creating reproducible self contained environments for your applications. It’s not the simplest solution out there but once you understand the basics it is a very powerful tool for system reliability.

Yea, I did. When you start modifying configs and writing shell scripts git can help you track those as well.

Seems solid enough of an outline. My only note is I highly recommend git first, you don’t need to be an expert or anything but if you understand the basics and use it you will never lose a line of code and be able to lookup historical changes to find issues faster. Then when ready you can stand up a simple git server like gitea to host those repos and collaborate.