Ahoy-hoy!
That depends on how would you like to run it. For beginners, we wholeheartedly suggest using docker build, since it does a lot of thinking and doing for user. It won't be running from an external drive, though - docker usually stores its volumes on system partition - but it doesn't take a whole lot of space.
Project is indeed quite technical, but if the goal is to at least set it up and fly around for yourself - docker build is there to make it as simple as entering 2 commands in the console.
And yep, we do have a discord server. Feel free to drop by and say hi 🙂
https://discord.gg/fTfAREYxbz