Essentials? Difficult to decide, it depends on why you are even selfhosting in the first place.
At a first glance and looking at my attempt at a homelab:
- some sort of basic web service (eg.: nginx + PHP setup)
- some sort of repo manager service (I do Fossil, but I hear most people use eg.: Gitea)
- XMPP server
- Jellyfin server
- Minetest server
Wait, the Deck doesn’t have an Ethernet port?
It’s a Linux machine!