Totally agree, which is the reason why I recommend the book. The author explains the difference in a great detail and by that you learn so much about Sun. …and NeXT or course :).
I can recommend the book “Steve Jobs and the NeXT big thing”. The Author compares NeXT a lot with Sun including their business strategies. I have never thought I will learn so much about the early days of Sun by reading this book.
But for my homelab I run UnRAID (https://unraid.net/) which is an amazing software to rollout your own NAS and run services as Docker containers. Furthermore, the web UI is amazing to manage Docker containers and VMs.
And the community is awesome if you need any help.