520

It’s very, very useful.

For one thing, its a ridiculously easy way to get cross-distro support working for whatever it is you’re doing, no matter the distro-specific dependency hell you have to crawl through in order to get it set up.

For another, rather related reason, it’s an easy way to build for specific distros and distro versions, especially in an automated fashion. Don’t have to fuck around with dual booting or VMs, just use a Docker command to fire up the needed image and do what you gotta do.

Cleanup is also ridiculously easy too. Complete uninstallation of a service running in Docker simply involves removal of the image and any containers attached to it.

A couple of security rules you should bear in mind:

1. expose only what you need to. If what you’re doing doesn’t need a network port, don’t provide one. The same is true for files on your host OS, RAM, CPU allocation, etc.
2. never use privileged mode. Ever. If you need privileged mode, you are doing something wrong. Privileged mode exposes everything and leaves your machine ripe for being compromised, as root if you are using Docker.
3. consider podman over docker. The former does not run as root.

Google drive isn’t self-hosted though,

Doesn’t matter to most people, and for those it does matter to, there’s OwnCloud and a ton of other options

and they charge for any significant amount of storage.

Storage costs money, dude, and GDrive don’t cost much.

I’m running Ubuntu server, so there is no desktop to access via rdp, and I don’t have to open an ssh port to access this.

If you are worried about opening SSH to the internet, you should be absolutely fucking terrified of opening a browser based admin portal to the net. SSH is fucking bulletproof compared to any web admin console you can think of.

Why are these not more popular?

Because the use cases for these are very niche.

Those who simply want access to their files will find Google drive much easier.

Those who need advanced access will use RDP or SSH instead

I’m sorry you have such a shit family bro :/

I have yet to see a USB cable near the cash register that won’t do a data transfer or charge a device. It may not necessarily fast charge a phone, but if you have such a phone, chances are you already have a cable/adapter at home that works with it.

It’s flash drives and cables, dude. The ones at the counter will get the job done just fine.

Gitlab can do what you need