[vetinari]

Personally, I'm using a small Synology NAS and the Contact and Calendar servers that Synology provides. It solves the problem for being a host for multiple devices, with my laptop not having to be on, or even present, at all times. Also having dns entry helps.

But for running on your laptop? Yes, nextcloud is overkill, it is not contacts/calendar server in the first place. I would look for smaller, more focused tools instead, baikal for example. For another inspiration, you can have a look at what davx5 -- the caldav/carddav provider for android -- tests against (https://www.davx5.com/tested-with).

[c_prompt]

I use davx5 with my NextCloud setup on the cloud. But that's not what I use (or want to use) for other events, contacts, to-dos, etc.