I recently switched from Kanboard to vikunja. Main reason is that it is more mobile friendly, which allows to jot down ideas quickly or to use it as a grocery lists.
By the way, thanks for creating this software. I especially like the clean split between the API server and the frontend. Interaction feels almost like a local application.
Initially I was also interested in this. There is the staticpath option in the backend config. You can point it to the directory of the frontend files. Theoretically, both the backend and the frontend could be served by the builtin webserver. Unfortunately, for this to work most frontend URLs must get rewritten/rerouted to /index.html and this does not seem to be implemented. Shouldn't be too complicated though.
In this specific case it is not very complicated and actually pretty close to unzip, edit config and run. I have deployed it on a Raspberry running FreeBSD, so Docker is not an option.
The backend server is written in Go and after building it only a single binary has to be deployed. A second repository contains the frontend (HTML, JS) which you copy to a path that you make available via your webserver. That's basically it.
A mobile app is work in progress[1]. I am currently using the web interface which is quite usable on a mobile phone. Lists work quite nicely, also on smaller screens. I was using Kanboard previously and mobile usage was a bit too complicated.
CalDAV seems to be supported[2]. I have not tried it (yet).
pdfTeX does not use your system fonts. It will not even load TrueType or OpenType fonts, but usually uses Type 1 fonts. Fonts for LaTeX come bundled with your TeX distribution like TeX live (on my Arch system present in /usr/share/texmf-dist/fonts/).
If you want to use system fonts you should have a look at Lua(La)TeX (or Xe(La)TeX but I think focus shifted completely to the LuaTeX engine).
I am using sway (similar to i3 but for wayland) and it is working flawless on an Lenovo X230 running FreeBSD 13. It seems biggest problem will be graphics driver for different hardware.
Check out the dn42 community if you simply want to play with the tech stack for free. The network uses the private AS range, allocates addresses from the private address ranges and peering happens over point-to-point VPN links.