In this livestream, I jumped into HomeDockOS completely blind—zero prep, zero testing, and all the troubleshooting right in front of you. The whole goal was simple: take a spare machine (the Beelink ME Pro I used last week) and see if we can turn it into a private cloud server without a script, a safety net, or me pretending I’ve already done it before. I started by poking around the homedock.cloud site, talking through what HomeDockOS claims to do (200+ one-click apps, encrypted storage, remote access, and even local AI with Ollama), and then I moved straight into the “let’s install it” part. Because I wanted the best chance of success, I stuck to what the HomeDock team recommends: Debian 12 on bare metal. I downloaded the Debian 12 ISO, wrote it to a USB drive using Rufus (yes, with all the warnings and weird prompts), and got everything staged for the install. Along the way, I also talked about my real-world homelab workflow—why I prefer simple setups, how I got pushed into Docker back in the OMV days, and why live, unfiltered problem-solving is the whole point of these streams.