Hi and welcome to the club.
First of all a disclosure I am not an IT guy and or programmer and barely know what I am doing myself :D
My first question is: Is your Nuc dedicated hosting hardware?
If so i would maybe suggest an OS that is more hosting focused, I personally use unraid, a friend of mine already used it at the time and helped me set everything up so I just went with it. TrueNAS is the real og and workhorse of the selfhosting world and also big in the professional space. Unraid is pretty simple but more heavy on sytem useage while truenas is more light weight but needs a bit more work beeing done manually. TrueNAS is free, undraid you pay a one time license. Those are the big 2 I know about.
Both of these options have an insane ammount of documentation. And ready to go docker for basically anything you could want.
There is of course much more, for example Debian server comes to mind. If this is not dedicated hosting hardware and you need a normal desktop environment I can’t help much there.
As far as I understand: Never expose anything directly to the internet. Tailscale is a good option, I personally use nginx proxy manager as reverse proxy. Both should be fine but Tailscale is more secure tho. I also only have 3 things exposed: Nextcloud, Immich and foundry vtt. And keep your shit up to date :D
Hope this helps for now. If you have any additional questions or I missed an important part for you just ask :)
Unraid is a full os You install it on a usb, plug it in and it should just run. Then you get a ui you can access locally over the network.
I just saw they changed their licences :(
Apparently you only get one year of updates EXCEPT you buy the most expensive license (I would actually recomend that) then it’s unlimited updates
Essentially how it works on unraid: You install a docker, the docker gets a local IP and you can access any service on your network by entering the IP of the docker. This will be yourserverIP:dockerIP
I run jellyfin locally I just installed the jellyfin app on my tv and entered the jellyfin IP when connecting to a server. That’s it
When connecting from outside your network stuff gets a bit more complicated but all doable.
SpaceinvaderOne on youtube has great videos on how to set up a reverse proxy and tailscale if you want to get an idea what both does and how much work it is. He also uses Unraid.
Since Unraid got so dam expensive I feel like it’s worth mentioning hexOS. It’s around the same pricepoint like unraid and is essentially a wrapper over true nas. So you get all the documentation and power of trunas but also a nice and easy to use UI. Never used it my self tho.