I've setup many a Linux server over the years. Generally I set it up, and it works great for ages, but when something eventually does break, it's been so long since I touched it that I'm lost.
Another issue is "works on my machine" - with containers I don't need to worry about what packages and versions are available in the package manager. I can run a container anywhere.
And in the case where there is a hardware failure, it takes an age to get everything back up and running. Using containers forces you to have everything setup in a reproducible way.
If you're not familiar with containers, I understand that the learning curve might seem steep, or that it might seem too complicated, but it's honestly not.
Now, I wouldn't personally advocate for running k8s, or even k3s, on a personal server - they really are very complicated, and k8s in particular uses a lot of CPU and RAM to do even nothing. But Docker Compose and Swarm are pretty simple really, and life before them was absolutely worse - I love these tools.
Docker compose is too dang easy to use. It took me like an hour to get all the services like I wanted them, and it’s reasonably portable if I ever need to move the services to a different box. And I’ve had stuff break on apt upgrade before, but I haven’t had trouble with updated containers (if I build them or get them from hub).
K8s at home would make me wake up in a cold sweat at night to make sure I didn’t break something though. That’s way too much.
I do use Docker on my personal server so that I don't have to struggle with getting compatible dependencies between my local dev machine and the server.
Additionally, the Docker daemon can be figured to auto-restart containers if/when they crash. I use a single docker-compose.yml to bring up the containers I want and to not need to configure each application individually.
I use Docker + Traefik and it's just a heaven. No nginx configurations, no cert generation, renewing or configuration of an auto-renewer. Everything just works out of the box
Amount of work I have to do on k3s vs amount of work I have do on "classic" setup... well, k3s is greatly simpler. And I can throw out some problematic distro idiosyncracies.
People are assuming k3s or managed Kubernetes (like GKE) is too complex or requires too much maintenance. I have bunch of applications running on raspberry pi and another ubuntu machine at home as classic setup and running GKE on production for our company. I can say that I spend more time on classic setup and simple things on Kubernetes like zero downtime deployment or auto cert with Let's Encrypt much harder on classic setup.
