CLAs can be abusive, but not necessarily. Apache Foundation contributors need to sign CLAs, which essentially codify in contract form the terms of the Apache 2.0 license. It’s a precaution, in case some jurisdiction doesn’t uphold the passive licensing scheme used otherwise. There’s also a relicensing clause, but that’s restricted to keeping in spirit, they can’t close the source.
Arch for stuff I have physical access to. Nothing’s ever gone wrong, so it’s worth it for the immediate updates and consistency with my other systems. For VPS I use Debian though, occasionally the unstable/Sid branch if I really need the latest updates. There are almost always Debian images available on a VPS.
Forgejo is my go to, I ran it in a GCP micro instance, which has 768 MB ram and a piddling processor. One of my friends works for a company that had all their devs run a local instance in addition to the main repo, it was that light.
Gitea is the former go to, but gitea was hijacked and stolen from the community by a for profit company. Forgejo is currently a drop in replacement fork, but with added privacy features, future federation options, and a reputable parent organization.
Recently got a Onyx Boox Ultra and it’s incredible compared to my previous Kobo. Basically, its 10" with stylus input and a keyboard case. The special sauce is it running Android, complete with the Google store. The display tech is advanced enough that normal apps, for instance Connect for Lemmy, work fine. I have mine setup with Syncthing, Home Assistant, Obsidian, it all just works, mostly. I’d recommend using a 3rd party launcher and not touching the Onyx account, though.
I’ve had great experiences with Kobo, though. I literally went through 4 models because they kept upping their game. They’re less sketchy than Onyx and are very open; you can load your own books of nearly any format and modify it as it runs linux. You can even completely replace the OS.
I use netdata, it’s very good at digesting thousands of metrics to sharing actionable. The cloud portion is proprietary, but you can toggle off the data collection. I did turn on the cloud portion though, I get email notifications when something breaks. Might sound counter to the self hosted mantra, but a self hosted monitoring system isn’t very helpful when your own systems go down.
Codeberg is run off of donations, they have no service contract revenue. Nobody, much less a volunteer, wants to commit to a 5 or 10 year service plan like that, it’s not sustainable for a small project from a non profit.