Hi All,

I've gone down the rabbit hole that started with purchasing a Ledger 2 months ago, to running Electrum on airgapped mini-pcs, then learning how keys are derived from seeds, and digging inside the psbt's just to see how they work.

Anyway, I figured I might as well go one step farther and run a bitcoin node for myself. I have installed both Start9 and Umbrel to check them out and they look pretty similar, but being as the blockchain download is HUGE, I'd like to ask for opinions on pros and cons before I choose to install the big stuff.

From what I have seen:

1. Umbrel seems to have a lot more "stuff" available, although I only want bitcoin, electrum server, mempool and maybe the lightening stuff later, so start9 seems to have what I need.
2. Umbrel seems set up to use TOR as an option, whereas Start9 seems to have TOR on by default. I don't really want TOR running all the time, and from what I read, bitcoin core doesn't use it anyway. There is probably a way to disable it in Start9 from the command line, but I wonder if that will break things.

Anyway, just from point 2, Umbrel seems better, but from those of you with experience, what do you think?

Thank you, and I hope I didn't post to the wrong section of the forum. If so, sorry.