I doubt you would notice much a performance hit if any. What you’re losing out on is reliability. You playing games and downloading/executing stuff causes extra processes to run that normally wouldn’t on a server. The more processes running the more chances for a glitch in the matrix to crash the machine. You could also do an update that breaks compatibility with other programs (not so much an issue with Docker). The biggest point of a dedicated sever at home is the fact that you set it then don’t fuck with it - This leads to higher reliability.

I have multiple layers of ad blocking.

• Pihole for DNS
• Firefox w/uBlock Origin & SponsorBlock (YouTube) on every PC
• Brave browser on iPhones.
• SmartTubeNext (YouTube) on Chromecast
• All of my mobile devices are connected by VPN to utilize Pihole when I’m not home

I have a 2 bay NAS in RAID1 that houses all of our documents, family photos, etc. This is pushed to the cloud with up-to 30 day versioning of individual files.

RAID is for data redundancy. Cloud is for backup.

I used to use Ubuntu VMs on Proxmox host but I’ve switched to Debian a year or so ago.

Lookup pihole and unbound. You’ll get ad blocking along with your own dns resolver. There are several near-copy-paste tutorials out there.