The thing is, many people will show some interest in this but ultimately don’t want to do it themselves. It does require varying amounts of time to learn & most importantly to fix it. Many people are time poor or would use their spare time on other stuff.
You should ask whether they’re genuinely interested in setting this up & if so what the concerns are.
this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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Agreed with this, they may want the setup but have no interest in managing it, no matter how simple you get it. If you do it for them you might be setting yourself up as their permanent support.
I'd gauge how interested they actually are, and make sure they're willing to learn enough to follow basic maintenance routines.
The moment you help them set it up you also agree to being their IT Support when anything goes wrong. Do you really want to deal with that?
Not that I don't agree with encouraging learning and welcoming more people to self hosting, but at some point there's just a differentiating factor between paying for access to services for convenience and simplicity sake versus the higher friction process of learning to self host.
Even finding tools that can do this in more convenient or UI friendly ways shouldn't be spoon fed. I can't foresee a self hosted setup that at no point would ever need basic terminal knowledge. What happens when they want to migrate to a new server?
https://www.openmediavault.org/ or https://yunohost.org have a nice web-gui that allows you to control most things.
But to be honest, these are only to make the entry easier and convenient for maintenance. Sooner or later something will likely break and then you will have to be at least a tiny bit comfortable with the terminal. If you are unwilling to learn that, then self-hosting is probably not the right thing for you.
I know this is not the answer you are looking for, but if they happen to have a spare Windoze license laying around (or willing to shell out) then all that stuff can be done on an OS they are probably comfortable with. Yes, it still means learning some stuff, but there is no overwhelming need to learn an entire OS to do it.
Another option is to use a Synology NAS. All those things you are talking about are packages, point and click install and setup from the NAS browser. Again pricey, but far more intuitive for non-techos. This also has an advantage of being able to upgrade as their media store gets larger.
(I don't do either of these things, but I know we support a lot of people radarr/sonarr/lidarr/nzbget/plex/emby/HA/openHAB etc in a win environ.)
But I would teach them how to git gud, and learn FOSS and read HOWTO's to install all that stuff (without the need for Docker, so they actually learn). Honestly after the first 5 installs on a VM (which can be deleted and recreated if fscked up) running sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade and git clone ... etc. with you looking over their shoulder while reading the HOWTO with them. That would be quite rewarding for them, probably make you feel good too.
It's only 1 command but here they have all they ever wanted with a nice web interface: https://yunohost.org
You should continue to wear your wizard's hat with pride. 🧙♂️
Make them an unraid usb and then they can just stick in a spare pc and they should be good to go. Then they can use the gui to download and install docker images. Would be the path of least resistance IMO.
If you're going to do something, do it well.