Hi , sooo I’ve been wanting to make a homelab for a couple different reasons but not sure how to go about it and what I need.

So I have

- a old 2015ish MacBook Air with a broken screen ( type c ports only )

- A 2017 macbok pro ( type c ports only )

- a raspberry pi 4

- a thinkcenter ( minimum specs but i upgraded the ram to 32 gb of ddr4 ram and windows 11 pro)

- a old windows surface laptop ( cheap 8gb of ram)

-old iPhone 8 or se

-flipper zero

Some things I want to get into is setting a home server, learn and apply virtualization, have a somewhat portable smart home setup that I can control smart devices from in an apartment setup ( where shared WiFi might get in the way of that ) , learn and connect to some level Mac , Linux and windows, which ip kvm to get for remote access.

Some things kinda holing me back is the networking devices and which brands to go with( ugreen , ubiquity, Alta or unify some other stitches , routers etc ), which nas storage , all the different softwares ( proxmox , VMware…