Works pretty well and with some configuration you can get almost the same experience as configuring Linux with Ansible.

Luckily not. I work in the infrastructure team at a small company, everything we do is managed using Ansible (even Windows), so developing on Linux is a much nicer experience.

For communication we use Mattermost and Jitsi plus many other open source tools and services.

You see, if you buy a game they have already put in all the work, but if you donate they just get money to work on whatever. I know which version any corporation would like

I prefer | less or less file.txt because I can search interactively

I use Migadu, it’s probably the closest you can come to fully managing email while not hosting your own server. All their plans are limited on inbound/outbound mails per day and storage used. Beyond that you add as many domains as you want (within reason on their cheapest plan) and create any number of separate mailboxes/users.

I just pull the latest container to update. Not sure if that’s what you’re referring to

I use it in my homelab to host stuff. Everything is fully open source, so you can compile Xen Orchestra manually and get all the enterprise features for free. Or if you’re lazy like me, use the installer script or container by ronivay. I’ve been using it for years and again, you get all the enterprise level features for free.

They have an Emacs client, heck yes!

You can always use F-Droid or the official APK from Github to update microg.

Normal Lineage needs a Magisk module or flashable zip to allow microg as network location provider. That’s been pre-done with LOS4ug

Yes, it’s legit. Very importantly it ships microg as a system app, so network location can be used. This doesn’t work without a patch or root module otherwise.

Keep in mind you’ll only get updates monthly instead of weekly versus LineagOS.

Lastly, this is still Android. You’ll just be switching away from the Google-infested Android to one with mostly open source components.

It’s unfortunately how gmail handles IMAP. I don’t think any clients handle that differently

Ah, but primary recountings aren’t sources, you first need to write an article or book about it (according to Wikipedia sometimes)

I haven’t had any issues by (mostly) following their recommended structure for Music. Do you have all the albums in the same folder?

Disclose the exact uses and let customers decide

Recycling sounds suspiciously like what “AAA” studios already do

• how do you use ansible? Is there a good source for roles or playbooks to set up services? I feel like ansible is 30% more headache right now during config.

I write my own playbooks and roles, but often I can just copy paste an existing setup and use it for a new service. For example containers, you can probably write one role once, copy it and modify some variables to set up another container service.
For stuff where there are well maintained community roles (e.g. community.zabbix) just use those and configure with variables.

• how do you deal with motivation loss?

I just don’t work on a part I don’t want to do atm. It’s supposed to mostly be a hobby and as long as my services I care about are running it’s fine.

• how do you deal with the overwhelming amount of choices and information and disciplines (networking, storage, VMS, Linux…) that comes with selfhosting?

I’m on my 2.5th setup now, just choose something and see if it works. If not, see how much it bothers you and what parts you want to migrate.
I’m a big fan of VMs, so I’m using XCP-ng. IMO this makes testing and backups very easy, I just take a snapshot and figure stuff out, no big deal if it breaks.

• how do you find the sweetspot between ease of use, ease of set up, security, redundancy? I feel like I am maybe too pranaoid to loose my data again (dropped a hard drive many years back, I lost all of my projects)

You’re better than 95% of people just by thinking about this. For backups, identify which data you want to back up and do that. If you don’t want to deal with Ansible right now, just set something up manually and automate it later (paste your commands into a readme for reference)
For me, I make sure to backup my Nextcloud data. That included personal photos, files and other hard to replace stuff. Other than that I have daily VM backups to a Hetzner storage box and my NAS. I don’t backup my media on Jellyfin, that’s just not as important.
VMs also make it easy to replace your host. Just install the hypervisor on a new server and restore VMs to it.

• maybe overall, how do you manage your perfectionism?

I guess I’m not a perfectionist. It took me multiple months and monetary incentive (avoid renting two servers) to migrate from my Debian single host setup to VMs years ago.
Some of my Ansible playbooks are “version 1”, where I didn’t know what I was doing. I’m on version 3 now. They still work, I even use some of them occasionally, just haven’t taken the time to migrate them yet.
Maybe you can take a similar approach with some of your services that aren’t that essential and spread out the work more so you can enjoy it when you want to.

I think Memories schedules its scan with the normal cron job for Nextcloud

I use FolderSync to push my photos to Nextcloud. Much more reliable than their app

Couldn’t find it in there, but maybe this opens up live collaboration between desktop and web users on the same document.

LineageOS with microg