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.
Instead of minutia, I’m just going to mention the few reasons that really sold me on containers.
Security: Being able to host external services that only have access to the folders I map to it.
Compartmentalization: I can specify exactly what resources I want to limit/control for each individual service. I.E. stacking a VPN on top of services for a 100% guaranteed Killswitch.
Automation: Docker is an incredible tool for automatically restarting services whenever they hit a snag and keeping your services up to date with the latest version.