I don’t have a home server yet but I’m exploring and sometimes I get confused about some posts here.
For example I saw a post asking for recommendation for a “self hosted budget management app”. Can’t you just install this type of app to your phone or pc? What’s the purpose here, will you host it and access it from a browser? Or do you only want to backup its data to your server?
I hope I don’t sound stupid please enlighten me.
Typically if someone wants to self host something like that it’s because they want to interact with it using a mobile app.
Without that aspect, you’re correct that desktop software would be the more typical way to go.
Using the budgeting example, self hosting would be to provide something like Mint rather than something like QuickBooks.