Can you expand? Haven’t pulled the trigger yet

Simplicity, quality and variety of apps focus on privacy and self sovereignty. Tor integration, file management, nostr relai, sparrow web, ... and many more things (apart from node, electr, mempool, albyhub,...). Everything free, and software with MIT license. Working perfectly with a €200 minipc with 16RAM and 2 TB SSD(€100). The user experience is the best I had so far on @Start9, and I've tried mynode and umbrel for years.

The fast BTC sync is slick

Yes! In less than a day, the whole node was synced from scratch

is there any good setup videos or links you recommend? I’ve been looking into self hosting and could use some help.

Sure thing! I followed this guy And the actual docs by @Start9

Start9 | Start Fresh

Start9 documentation for sovereign computing with StartOS