Yeah, Pipewire is pretty great IMO.
People love to go "you hate on Systemd/Wayland? you just HATE PROGRESS!!", but like, no, new stuff itself isn't the problem and this proves that. Pipewire doesn't seem to be all that controversial, I don't really see anyone hating on it, or people going "YOU HAVE TO ACCEPT IT!!!".
-- Frost
The homeserver doesn't have to be fancy. We're running all our stuff off a Dell Vostro from 2012 we got for like $30 on Craigslist. (It did need another $30 replacement PSU though. And it has 8GB RAM and a 500GB SSD which is nothing to sneeze at for a machine that cheap and that old.)