That sounds like true freedom, and also like something I wish deeply that I had time and energy to make my daily driver - I’m a purist, but I’m also a pragmatist and i can feel the burnout already.
Respect for using it as a daily driver - even for a personal only machine, that’s a pretty high bar, especially long term.
It does sound horrific, but mostly because it would be poorly executed by many devs.
Well, and the seeming trend towards install commands that look like curl $file.sh | sh
But if they’re not actively encouraging that, I see no issue with a well maintained install tool, created from well maintained toolsets that work on essentially any platform.
Just too easy to get over a barrel trying to DIY it, and the first time ya screw it up, you lose a ton of credibility with employees which also has a great deal of value.
If your needs are fairly low on the processing side, you can snag a cloud VPS on LowEndBox for five or six dollars a month. Quality is highly variable ofc, but I’m reasonably my happy with mine.
No AWS, etc (though I don’t know offhand where the actual box lives), SSH access defaults to a key, and the rest (firewall, reverse proxy if you like, and all the other best practices) are but an apt-get away and a quick searxng to find and dissect working configs.
Incidentally, searxng is a good place to start- dead easy to get rolling,and a big step towards degoogling your life. Stand it up, throw a pretty standard config at nginx, and do a certbot —nginx -d search.mydomain.com - that all there is to it.
YMMV with more complex apps,but there is plenty of help to be had.
Oh…. Decide early on if anonymity is a goal,or you’re ok tying real life identity to your server if someone cares to look. Register domains and make public facing choices accordingly.
Either choice is acceptable if it’s the right one for you, but it’s hard to change once you pick a path.
I’m a big fan of not hosting on prem simply because it’s one more set of cables to trip over, etc. But for a latte a month in hosting costs, it’s worth it to me.
I’ve used TimeTrex in the past. For my needs “, it was overly complex.
This is one of those areas where I’d think long and hard about self hosting, if you’re doing more than tracking your own hours.
Lots of compliance risk here, and transferring some of that risk to the payroll company is part of what one pays for with those services.
In my case, I just needed to substantiate invoices for a couple of clients I contracted for, and I was strictly paying myself and once in a blue moon my wife.
Underrepresented at best, at worst it’s arguably too easy to forget that Alpine is more than just container images.
Not sure how to solve that problem, it’s my go to for rolling an image but wouldn’t normally make the shortlist for standalone machines. In a prod env, that’s basically Deb, RHEL derivatives, etc. In a personal env for me, Arch derivs tend to win out on non-critical services if only because I invariably learn something useful that I wouldn’t want to learn in prod.