I am legally blind. I got into programming and linux specifically so that I can improve my life, even though I don’t want to pursue an IT career professionally.

So, the short answer to your question is: most of my apps really do improve my daily life. And a good many of them I wrote myself.

Here’s a largely-arbitrary mind dump:

• Windows, unfortunately, has the best on-screen magnifier, so I cannot entirely leave the platform.
• However, most GUI apps and web pages suck. They suck in many fascinating ways that are beyond the scope of this comment, but I have found that some tasks are quicker to perform from a CLI than from a GUI. For instance, managing documents. I can write a shell oneliner faster than I can load a GUI app for bulk file renaming or whatever other thing people tend to do. I can tell gnuplot to produce a graph much faster than I can draw one by hand.
• Until very recently there wasn’t a Dark Mode for word processors. So I’d just write Markdown files in VS Code and then convert with pandoc.
• Math is much easier with scripting than with calculators
• Text to speech is a lifesaver. And sometimes you need to write your own whacky scripts to scrap webpages and read them out to yourself.
• I need to conform to academic referencing standards. Who’s got time for that? Nobody. Computers can do that for me.
• Web scraping — some websites are so bad, the only way to use them is to scrape then convert.

But that’s from an accessibility perspective and more programming than self-hosting per se.

Now from reading your OP, I think it is an attitude problem rather than a selfhosting problem. uBlock Origin and AdGuard (blocky, in my case) are not mutually exclusive. You just need to know how TF to use them. Since I use uBlock in Paranoid Mode (basically a lite uMatrix mode with filterlists), I don’t need to block so-called tracker scripts at the DNS level. My DNS adblocker is only blocking ads. Ergo, things like shopping do not break. You are saying that it is easier to disable uBlock for shopping — but I can change DNS with one script. Just temporarily switch to 1.1.1.1 or something, and everything works. Where’s the problem?

I’m not sure what your complaint is with Bitwarden. It is not exactly hard to back it up when it is running in docker, and easier still if you use vaultwarden (much simpler backend).

You say that you use ‘Portainer, Nginx Proxy Manager, Authentik, Uptime-Kuma, Wireguard’ and they are not improving your life.

I’ll agree on the first two, but maybe that’s just because I hate webuis with a burning passion. But how are Authentik and Wireguard not improving your life?

Do you know why I use wireguard? I’ll tell you why I use wireguard.

A long time ago, I needed to go to hospital. I also had a university assignment due the same day as I was in hospital. Thought to myself, ‘no problem, I’ll just bring my laptop with me; I’ve got Google Drive Sync set up so I can work on my files remotely’. So I check in, boot up, log in, and what do I see? Old files. Old files from three weeks ago. Why? Because Google Drive decided to go on strike and, in true GUI App fashion, displayed a tiny error notification in the tray icon that you would need a microscope to see. Naturally, being half-blind, I didn’t see it. So now I am, figuratively up shit creek without a paddle!

So what do I do? Well, I deploy “KVM over Mom”. I ask my mom to drive back home — mind you, this is a 70-minute drive — and get her to bring my machine up. I walk her through getting into my machine and resurrecting Google Drive Sync. And then I spend 4 hours in the hospital queue finishing off my assignment.

That episode taught me a few things:

• Google sucks but I have to live with it
• KVM-over-Mom is not a viable long-term solution
• I need remote access
• Redundancy is good.

So, fast-forward a few months and I am using my dad’s NAS as a jumphost/proxy into our home network, where I can use wake-on-lan and RDP to connect to my machine. I have also switched from Google Drive Sync to File Stream (as it then was) so that my files are automatically available in gdrive. And that latter bit saves my ass some months later when my dad’s NAS has a disagreement with a kernel update and I can no longer remote in. We also have a hoard of Chinese bots hammering away at our internet-facing 16-year-old router, so that’s not great either. Also, ssh tunnels are neat, but are annoying to configure.

Fast forward a few years and an Unspecified Virus of Unspecified Origin that temporarily obviated the need for remote access, I now use a VPN. In fact, me being a somewhat cautious person, I use several VPNs, for remote access into my home network. There is a vanilla wireguard “in case things with multiple moving parts break” tunnel and more convenient mesh orchestrators, although I have a hard time finally deciding between innernet and headscale.

And does having remote access to my home computer improve my life? Yes. Most definitely. My home computer and server have much more storage than does my laptop. And sometimes you just need access to your copy of Hanks Australian Constitutional Law 12th ed, what can I say…

The issue I see with many self-hosters is that they start with a solution looking for a problem as evidenced by the frequent “I am bored, tell me what to selfhost” posts we see on this sub. It is much better to start with a problem and try to solve it. Then you don’t have to have an existential crisis over whether you are hosting too many replicas of postresql…

:wq