Mostly because my files stay on my hardware, on my network. In case of internet down/broken/filtered I can still access all my data. That is one of the points of self hosting. Not the only one, granted, and maybe not even the most critical, but having the opportunity, better to host on your turf.

Go ahead the self host on a cloud somewhere, nothing bad about that! Have fun, enjoy, learn and be digitally independent is the core of self hosting.

Ok, i misunderstood!

I run podman containers on my bazzite machines, basically you convert a docker-compose file to a .container file, here's a bunch of examples, nextcloud is there, drop it in ~/.config/containers and run systemctl daemon-reload and it's now a systemd unit that you start stop etc like any other. Updates are with podman autoupdate.

You can use podlet to convert docker-compose files (90% it works, otherwise it gets you 90% of the way there). It's basically the fedora (/redhat) way to run containers.

I have no idea where you got it not being recommended (but adding to the main image sure is discouraged), and it's certainly better than adding a vm for containers, which pretty much defeats the purpose of containers (to run using your main kernel, but contained).

I've been running my arr stack (with gluetun in a pod) etc this way for years now, very trouble free. Here's a immich example.

It's a bit of a learning curve, but it pays off.

Ah, I already nuked everything and started from scratch on Debian... Many thanks tho