I know this seem like a typical “Your opinion man” post but honestly, is there anything really useful beyond hosting an adblocker? (read: complementary, not found elsewhere, that enhances own’s personal needs and/or life as a whole). And yes, I’m aware of what can be hosted – picture editors, video editors, webtops, dhcpcd, emulators, and so on.
But the question is – why I’d need all that if these stuff can be found on any ordinary PC out there? Even phones. Hell, even on a smart tv. That is like “trying to reinvent the wheel” for no necessary purpose other than “to look cool”. There’s also “because its fun”, but is it really fun doing pretty much the same thing over and over again? There isn’t a “learning gap” between these hosting options – all of em have (pretty much) the same procedure to get things running.
With that said… I’ve been trying really, REALLY hard to host more stuff but I can’t go beyond hosting (only) an adblocker.
Honestly, for me it’s been a godsend when it comes to versioning. New version of software comes out, I pull the new container and flip to it. If there are issues, roll it back and stay there until the next release. I’ve had various DLL/pkg hell over the years. Plex, sure, but Jesus the problems my group has had with BG3 and other apps have made me wish I could better compartmentalize apps. Oh there’s another one. Ancient piece of software? Run it in a container with the ancient version of ,Net or VB or Python or whatever.
Same. I was long reluctant to use docker due to it’s cognitive and performance overhead, but once setting my system to just ignore postgresql in automatic updates settings proved insufficient and I realized I’d have to rollback ICU with all it’s dependencies as well, I’ve decided to say fuck it, I’ll use docker and if docker pisses me off, I’ll just hop to Nix.
This is exactly how I felt, I was reluctant then I started using docker and now I try and put most of my applications in some sort of container