I stopped installing every new self-hosted app, and my local stack instantly got healthier

Published Sep 27, 2026, 2:00 PM EDT Nolen began their writing career in 2019, with three years dedicated to editing the Creative section at MakeUseOf. Their expertise lies at the crossroads of technology and creativity, covering areas like photography, video editing, and graphic design. Outside of work, you'll often find Nolen diving into a good book, writing their own stories, or playing video games. Pretty much every week there's a new open-source or self-hosted app promising to replace some subscription, and the install instructions almost always make it look like one command and you're done. For anyone who writes about this stuff, or just likes poking at new software, that's hard to scroll past, and it usually ends with the millionth container sitting in your Docker. The problem is, those apps don't arrive alone - they usually bring their own setup quirks with them. Mine piled up to where I honestly couldn't tell you what half the containers were for. I got a lot pickier this past year or two, and having a simpler, narrower stack truly does improve your productivity, no matter how much each app promises to change your life. Docker is usually the first step, but rarely the last Almost every one of these apps starts with Docker, and on Windows that means opening Docker Desktop and waiting for the little whale to settle first. Docker on Windows also runs everything through WSL2, which is a full Linux virtual machine sitting inside Windows. I tried clearing the Linux stuff off my PC once and found out pretty fast that Docker won't work without it. That VM only gets part of your RAM by default too, so when I tried to get Open Notebook running Gemma 4 with only 8GB to work with, it got killed for running out of memory. That whole setup ate about two hours of my life, and I ended up with a subpar workflow and smaller model I didn't particularly like. And the first time I tried Presenton I got a scary-looking error about a missing pipe, and it turned out Docker just wasn't running. Every app also wants its own little ritual, usually a new folder and a compose.yaml typed into Notepad before PowerShell even comes into it. Things don't stay simple after that either. I forgot my Odysseus password once, and wiping the containers didn't reset it because the login file lived in a folder on my actual PC that I had to go find and delete myself. I've been self-hosting for a few years now and it still feels like stepping into a battlefield or trying to converse in a foreign language - so much of it either causes friction in my workflow or just goes over my head. The self-hosted apps that made the cut for me Some were easy to set up, others I kept anyway Penpot was the first thing I ever self-hosted, through Elestio's managed hosting back when I had no clue what a container was. Running it properly on my own machine is still the hardest setup here since it's a bunch of separate services working together, and Penpot's own docs say you'll want some Docker, DNS, and proxy knowledge first. It's one of my main design tools though, so this one is worth the effort for projects I want to keep private. Excalidraw and OmniTools sit at the easy end, both a single Docker run command and then you open them in the browser. Excalidraw's official image doesn't ship with analytics or tracking, and while the self-hosted version can't do sharing or collaboration, I'm the only one sketching in there anyway. This is what I recommend to anyone who wants a private whiteboard tool - it sits between feature-rich and simplistic. OmniTools handles my PDF splitting and merging now that Adobe's out of the picture for me. It's only a 28MB image and the files get processed in your browser. If there's only one self-hosted tool I could recommend, it would be OmniTools because it goes beyond PDFs and also handles JSON, images, text editing, videos, audio, everything. SiYuan is a single container too, you just set your own access code in the command so nobody else can wander into your notes. This is probably the closest open-source self-hosted Obsidian alternative you will find because the architecture is very similar. It's a block-based Markdown editor where you can create links to paragraphs instead of whole notes. The funny part is my local LLM setup isn't a container at all. LM Studio installs like any normal program and runs Qwen 3.5 9B and Gemma 4 E4B on my 8GB card, and its local server is what everything else points at. AnythingLLM and Cherry Studio, which I still open from time to time, are desktop installers too and barely need setup beyond that. What a new app has to prove before I self-host it now As my setup got smaller, my productivity improved To avoid falling down the rabbit hole of installing one thing after another just because I got a little curious, I came up with a system: a few questions I ask before something gets a container… First up, does it actually replace something I'd otherwise pay for or upload files to? Penpot, Siyuan, and OmniTools all fall in this category. Secondly, am I actually going to use it? Now, I will keep testing new tools as they drop, but if I keep reaching for its alternatives or something I already had before it, then there's no point in keeping the container for more than a week "just in case". Anything that needs more than one container also went out the window, and Penpot's the only multi-service setup that earned its spot, which I think is mostly down to how much design work I do in it. My Docker Desktop list is short and I can tell you what every container on it does, no stray nginx ones hanging around. Docker only runs when I actually need it now instead of sitting in the background holding onto RAM.