Cloudron is kind of a freemium product. They offer a few apps (two ?) for free to use. For more apps you need to pay. Their back-end does have a view-source-but-no-edit “open source” license last time I checked. Bu if you want to keep things easy, go for it.

I had similar requirements. I switched to Baikal, which has been happily running in a docker container ever since.

I second that. I’ve been using it for a couple of years, syncing calendars and address book with both my PC and my Android smartphone (using DavX) and never had any problems.

There is no difference between installing software on a VM and on “bare metal”. The OS takes care of the hardware stuff.

I installed it according to their manual on their website (https://radicale.org/v3.html) which is imo pretty easy. The TLDR is that you first install python3 and its package manager pipx, then you install radicale using pipx and finally you run it as a systemd service. You can just copy their service template. The issue comes when you need to run multiple web services though. Radicale wants to be on the website root (website.com/ instead of website.com/some/path/blablabla/ ) which is not as trivial to set up as the previous steps. They have a template for nginx and apache but you need to kinda know the very basics of one of these to set it up.

Also on debian there is a package so you could technically just apt install radicale and then systemctl enable radicale if you want to avoid creating a service and installing python.

Obviously you need to create a basic config either way according to their manual. At least for password authentification.

I just want an app to backup all the photos from my phone automatically. I use NextCloud for that currently and it works well. But, it’s kinda heavy for what I want/need.