I've always wondered this as well, and never seem to get an answer. Why would someone want to do this when they can get a better result either renting in the cloud, or just using a subscription?

Obviously I see the value in having something local from a control and privacy perspective, but it's surely always a net loss in terms of quality and capability of output, right?

Coding, my own proprietary code hence my desire for local hosting, a decent amount of legacy code. General troubleshooting of anything and everything from running Linux servers to fixing my car. Summarizing and translation of large documents occasionally. Also, image generation and other automations but obviously not LLMs for this.