I mean, speaking for myself — I know how to set things up for myself and have done it plenty of times, but sometimes for side projects and playing around, I jus

I mean, speaking for myself — I know how to set things up for myself and have done it plenty of times, but sometimes for side projects and playing around, I just don’t want to go through that process. I like having a dashboard I can login to, I like having to install one thing rather than having to setup my environment from scratch the same way every time. And I like that if I have to let someone else have access to something, I can give them something without having to pray they don’t break something or teach them. Honestly, I do a lot of the setup work for my actual job — including documenting/creating demos and examples for others — when I’m doing my own side stuff, I really just don’t want to bother, especially if it isn’t in production and it’s just on the home lab. To use a crude analogy, I could build my own robust NAS with hardware components and a BSD or Linux distro optimized for storage and acting as a home server with better performance at a lower price than a Synology system. Or I could continue to use my 8-bay Synology NAS (that I really want to upgrade), because the appliance nature is worth the extra cost and pure performance deficits. There was a time I took great pleasure in maintaining all that stuff myself but honestly, I just want to plug it in and know it’ll work with all my machines without having to think about it.