sonofearth

I’ve used Ubuntu Server, without any problems

If it works for you then great. But it doesn’t stand with your goal of Corporate Independence and Willingness to Learn — Given that it is slightly easier to setup than Vanilla Debian. But at the end of the day it is just Corporate Debian with more up-to date packages but overall less stable than Vanilla Debian.

upkeep and electricity costs of having your own hardware at home

It really won’t be much unless you’re gonna go for extremely beefy hardware like for Jellyfin hosting hundreds of newer codec 4k files with HDR and shit with dozens of users or some LLM — which anyways still would be cheaper than renting a VPS. Otherwise even a Raspberry Pi can do a decent job or even a mini pc (with something like Intel N100) which draws less power than a Mobile Phone charger. It also aligns with the idea of beginner friendly setup than using a VPS which half the people will even skip reading the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policies. So hosting something like Immich or Nextcloud, which is not encrypted at rest, is pretty much available for the VPS provider at instant.

convenience of a public IP

You don’t need a public IP to self-host. A beginner should start with private at first, learn from there and gain and grow otherwise it can lead to security risks — e.g you have mentioned to self-host Immich which doesn’t have any native 2FA. The self-hoster then will have to know about SSO based logins to secure instances like these.

use a dynamic DNS provider to get around

You also have Cloudflare Tunnel, Tailscale. Or you can use a 5$/month VPS in this instance to self-host Pangolin with Crowdsec for public access and block malicious or suspicious IPs. All of these options will mask your real public IP.

The guide was focused on being as simple and convenient as possible, with the target audience being absolute beginners

Ok but this asks for a lot of upfront investment. You don’t need to buy a domain or a VPS as a beginner (or even a mini PC as I mentioned). Just start with a PC or a Laptop you already own. Host the service and access it via private IPs instead of handholding them to copy and paste commands, configs and compose files from the internet (although you do have mentioned official documentation so kudos for that) just for the convenience of public access. A lot of people don’t know the 3-2-1 backup rule. One error might wipe off their entire Immich Library, Password Vaults or important documents in Nextcloud.

freeing yourself from your dependance on big corporations

Setting up a VPS with Ubuntu Server

This shouldn’t exist in the same article lol. You will just end up paying in subscriptions anyways while at the same time maintaining all the stacks — that too on Ubuntu where some articles will become useless after a few updates. Even 10$ a month will result in $120 every year — which can buy you a half decent second hand PC or a new Mini PC. You won’t even own your data when you rent a VPS.

You will end up saving a lot more by self hosting on your own hardware with vanilla Debian and be more independent at the same time. You will only need a VPS if you want to self-host your own reverse tunnel like Pangolin or FRP.

Once Adobe apps and new versions of Microsoft office start working reliably on Linux, 50% of corporate PCs are out of Windows’ market share.

What else do you expect everyone to do? Please enlighten us if you have something more to offer than switching to Linux — which seemingly is the best option currently.

Only office and LibreOffice FTW!

Joplin for sure. But I personally use Obsidian because of the UI. I sync it with my server using Syncthing. All devices are synced to the server and not with each other so I have one source of Truth.

Yep. Behind Nginx Proxy Manager and for external access, I use Pangolin on VPS to reverse tunnel to my Home.

I used to pay for Ente as well but then I tried Immich & IMO is just so much better. It is THE Google Photos alternative with almost all the features. And as you said, you can get encryption with LUKSing your drive or partitions. I have automated my backups so I am pretty much at ease especially after the stable release.

All photos in Ente are E2EE — only client devices can decrypt it. Immich doesn’t have any encryption thus allowing anyone who manages the server to view your photos as they are. Immich is fully self-hosted while with Ente you have an option for paying Ente or self-host. I honestly prefer Immich because the features outweigh the encryption as I own the server myself and Ente is a bit complicated to setup — I think you even have to deploy the entire Ente Ecosystem Stack.

If you don’t want to pay Immich for backups, you can take care of off-site backups yourself using tools like rclone to your hard drive or any off-site storage of your choice. A paywall here would be not allowing offsite backups at all unless you pay Immich.

Eating beef (or any meat for that matter) isn't harmful but "excessive consumption" of "industrially produced meat" is. And you shouldn't cut out meat from your diet — our bodies need those nutrients.