I actually have a k3s cluster running my blog/a few services. It just works, really, and so far it has been zero maintenance, zero downtime, apart from the large upfront investment (one weekend). Most importantly it was a great learning experience.

Imagine that the jobs you are interested in want to see some k8s experience. Either you teach it to yourself at home or you justify implementing it at your current job (resume driven development basically).

I have played around and learned the basics of docker etc without never ever wanting to run my home stuff on it. Learning and experimenting is not the same as using it as the primary tool to run your 'production' services at home.

I'd want to - or rather, the idea of managing a series of applications in a distributed fashion is interesting to me.

HOWEVER, i like to write distributed software that i want "uninformed" users to run. Aka not run on nice, automated k8 deployments - but on dirty, random computers.

My current idea is to run this software on all my personal PCs, but also a couple RaspPis over wifi in random locations.

Slow, poor connectivity machines sounds like a decent and predictably bad user environment.