Jérôme Flesch

My wife and I use a Nextcloud application called Cospend.

I for one use and self-host Meshcentral. The GUI is ugly, but it works well.

For those wondering, it also works with a Linux VM:

• Host: AMD Ryzen 9 3900X + Proxmox
• PCI passthrough for an Nvidia RTX 3060 12GB
• A Debian VM with 16GB and as many cores as the host have (if you set less cores, you will have to tune cpu affinity/pinning)
• An HDMI dummy
• I stream the VM to my office using Sunshine and Moonlight

It’s not easy to set up, but it works. I’m able to run some games like Borderlands 3 running at ~50FPS with a resolution of 1920x1080 with visual effects set to the max (important: disable vsync in the games !).

Only problem is disk access. It tends to add some latency. So with games coded with their ass (ex: Raft), the framerate drops a lot (Raft goes down to 20FPS sometimes).

Yes I would count this game as self-hosted (as long as you don’t need a third-party service to start it). And yes I agree it is a pretty wide definition. But at the same time, I really think there are a lot of good reasons to not dismiss it:

• I think it is the simplest form of self-hosting you can do and it is doable by anybody without much technical expertise. For people with little to no technical expertise, it’s the perfect gateway to self-hosting. All you need to start is a backup drive.
• For a single person, it’s actually the approach that often makes the more sense.
• And even for technical people, sometimes you just don’t want to deploy and maintain yet-another-service.
• And finally, you can still access your data when you’re offline.

To be honest, when it comes to self-hosting, I can’t shake this feeling that a lot of people are dismissing desktop apps immediately just because they are not cool nor hype anymore.

Regarding Syncthing, if I’m not mistaken, the Web UI can be opened to the network (most likely for headless servers) but by default it is only reachable through the loopback.

Regarding OP, for me, it wasn’t entirely clear at first whether they wanted network access or not. They clarified it later in comments.

It is “hosted” on your workstation. There is no need for a server-client relationship for self-hosting.

By requiring a server-client relationship, you’re making self-hosting uselessly hard to deploy and enforce a very specific design when others (P2P, file sync, etc) can solve the same problems more efficiently. For example, in my specific case, with Paperwork + Nextcloud file sync, my documents are distributed on all my workstations and always available even if offline. Another example is Syncthing which IMO fits the bill for self-hosting, but doesn’t fit your definition of self-hosted.

No it does not.

Self-hosted implies self-hosted. AFAIK, the end goal is being as autonomous as possible technologically-speaking. Why exclude desktop applications ?

AFAIK, unfortunately Dia hasn’t been maintained and hasn’t got a new release for a really long time. It’s still using GTK2.

You don’t even need Docker for draw.io: https://github.com/jgraph/drawio-desktop/releases

As suggested by others, your processes may be using too much memory. However I would also suggest you keep an eye on the output of dmesg. Maybe one of your disks is failing.

I think there is some confusion here.

Paperwork is a desktop application, not a web application. (eh, self-hosting doesn’t necessarily always imply web applications ! :). I for one use Nextcloud and nextcloud-desktop to keep my Paperwork work directories in sync on all my computers.

Paperless is a web application. Paperwork is a desktop application.

Paperwork seems to fit most of the bill except for one thing: it won’t scroll to where the search hit is (but it will highlight the matching keywords).

Just beware Paperwork won’t just create an index. It’ll organize the PDF its own way in its own work directory.

(full disclosure: I’m its main dev)

I use OPNSense virtualized on top of Proxmox. Each physical interface of the host system (ethX and friends) is in its own bridge (vmbrX), and for each bridge, the OpenSense VM also has a virtual interface that is part of the bridge. It has worked flawlessly for months now.