“ Anything that saved enough time or replaced enough subscriptions to justify keeping it around?”
You’re going to get a lot of affirmative answers here, which is maybe what you’re looking for. Maybe you’re brainstorming.
But I’ll affirm what you’ve probably been thinking all along: It’s not worth it. I set up a Lenovo ThinkCentre to be my personal Linux server running on my home network. I could use it for backups, ssh, taskwarrior, etc. It did solve some problems.
It also creates problems. The biggest is that it’s another computer to maintain. It needs updates. Critically, it needs security. You need to secure the ports and services, use vpn, etc.
I found that none of the gains were worth the maintenance. For my problem set, it’s easier to keep multiple cheap laptops in multiple locations and use a flash drive (rather than network) to move data between them.
For backups, specialized cloud services (currently Arq going to B2) does the job better, along with Carbon Copy Cloner to a local volume.
For me, having to maintain and secure it was too much work. A vps may have been easier in some ways, but harder in others.
So in the end you may be right: just run things on your laptop.
> It needs updates. Critically, it needs security. You need to secure the ports and services, use vpn, etc.
It seems like you are doing this wrong. Unattended-upgrades takes care of updates. The ports need not be "secured." Some need to be open if you are running publicly facing services like email, there is no way around it, and it's not a security problem per se. Internal services should be behind a VPN, but that is a one-time setup cost, and one that a cloud solution would also face.
Maintenance is running upgrades once a week/month -> 10mn
Depending on how critical your data is, you can rely on the provider's backup policy or setting up something as simple as a cron rsync on an external provider -> 2h to setup
I might have said the same thing in 2023, but any coding CLI installed on Linux can rip through this work and keep it updated.