Self-Hosting Thrives Amidst Tech Giants' Stumbles & AI Debates

"Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake," a quote famously attributed to open-source advocate Napoleon Bonaparte, has arguably never been more fitting for the self-hosted community. From AWS and Azure outages to GitHub's unofficial pause on feature development, hosted services have recently done a better job evangelizing self-hosted software than one could ever hope to do.

This week, Microsoft took center stage as the president of the Windows division announced the operating system is "evolving into an an agentic OS." This declaration was met with intense backlash from, well, pretty much everyone. Despite Bill Gates' recent warnings that we may be experiencing an AI bubble, companies consistently fail to grasp that users would rather spend 30 hours neglecting their families over the weekend to perfect their NixOS configs than have an LLM do everything for them.

Meanwhile, Google finally relented slightly on their recent sideloading decision, and Apple announced the "iPhone Pocket" – a $230 knitted sock carrying case (or bag?) resulting from a partnership between Japanese fashion designer Issey Miyake and Apple.

For those who read this newsletter for actual self-hosted news (oops!), consider these other notable activities from the week:

• Docker's v29 release bumped the minimum supported API version, which is breaking certain services. Exercise caution if updating this weekend.
• The Material for MkDocs (documentation) team launched their new static site generator, Zensical.
• KeePassXC, a popular open-source password manager, publicly addressed their decision to incorporate generative AI into their development process.
• The developer of BentoPDF, a new-ish web-based PDF toolkit, refused to stop kicking off their release notes with dad jokes (1, 2, 3, 4).
• Research faculty at the University of Maribor released the results of a recent survey conducted to determine why people self-host (spoiler alert: pleasure, autonomy, and usefulness).
• Home Assistant is scheduled to announce the launch of their next hardware product next Thursday (November 19th) at 3 PM EST.
• Lastly, I'll be publishing the results of my annual user survey next week and discussing them via live stream with YouTuber DB Tech next Saturday (November 22nd). A link will be provided in next week's newsletter.

Happy selfh.st/ing!

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Newswire

• About KeePassXC’s Code Quality Control – KeePassXC KeePassXC Team
• Zensical - A modern static site generator - Material for MkDocs We are thrilled to announce Zensical, our next-gen static site generator that addresses and overcomes the technical limitations of MkDocs. Material for MkDocs
• IncusOS Announced As Immutable Linux OS With ZFS For Running Containers It has been two years already since the Linux Containers project forked Canonical’s LXD project as Incus. Phoronix
• Google will let Android power users bypass upcoming sideloading restrictions Google will preserve sideloading for power users, but it hasn’t decided how that will work yet. Ars Technica
• Technitium DNS Server v14 Released! I am happy to announce the release of Technitium DNS Server v14, a cross-platform, free, open source software that can be used by anyo… Shreyas Zare
• Python Foundation rejects $1.5M grant with no-DEI strings : Foundation says it won’t compromise policy of inclusivity even if that cash would’ve really helped. The Register
• Backblaze Drive Stats for Q3 2025 Read the Q3 2025 Drive Stats report to see the latest annualized failure rates, and an analysis of how we define failure in the first place. Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup

Software Updates

New Software

Recently Discovered: Meet Postgresus, an automated PostgreSQL backup platform. With Postgresus, users can easily schedule and automate database backups to multiple storage destinations from the comfort of a web interface. Features include notifications, local and cloud storage, workspaces, access management, and smart compression. Postgresus can be easily deployed via bare metal or Docker and doesn't require any additional services to run.

Links: Website, Source Code

Videos and Podcasts

• Journiv - Private Journaling App with Daily Prompts | DB Tech
• Best Docker Apps of October 2025! | Servers@Home
• PRODUCT LAUNCH - The best just got better | Home Assistant
• Forget Dropbox! 😎 Host Seafile 12 — Your Fast Private Cloud | AlienTech42
• My BEST N8N HomeLab automations | Christian Lempa

Command Line Corner

Use wc -w <file> to quickly count the number of words in a file:

$ wc -w example.txt
  4 example.txt

Click here for an archive of commands shared in past newsletters.

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Executive Sponsors

Thanks to the following executive sponsors, whose continued support makes this newsletter possible:

• Servers@Home
• tirreno

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