I use portraiter extensively and am quite fond of it. I normally live on the CLI so picking a GUI tool over client management is unusual for me but I’ve found portainer largely just makes typical management easier and doesn’t get in my way at all.

For your other questions I have no answers. I self host everything so to me “what is worth running” is not a question that makes sense. I run what I need and my needs therefore define what I run.

I stick to IRC over matrix.