I'm running k3s at home on single node with local storage. Few blogs, forum, minIO.
Very easy, reliable.
Without k3s I would have use Docker, but k3s really adds important features: easier to manage network, more declarative configuration, bundled Traefik...
So, I'm convinced that quite a few people can happily and efficiently use k8s.
In the past I used other k8s distro (Harvester) which was much more complicated to use and fragile to maintain.
I tried Talos few month ago. Found it unstable and complicated; reported few bugs.
And because they are "immutable" - I found it's significantly more complicated to use with no tangible benefits. I do not want to learn and deal declarative machine configs, learn how to create custom images with GPU drivers...
Quite a few things which I get done on Ubuntu / Debian under 60 seconds - takes me half an hour to figure out with Talos.
Talos has it's own API that you interact with primarily through the talosctl command line. You apply a declarative machineconfig.yaml with which custom settings can be set per-node if you wish.
Very easy, reliable.
Without k3s I would have use Docker, but k3s really adds important features: easier to manage network, more declarative configuration, bundled Traefik...
So, I'm convinced that quite a few people can happily and efficiently use k8s.
In the past I used other k8s distro (Harvester) which was much more complicated to use and fragile to maintain.