Same here. Looks really cool, but I use a lot of sport features of my Garmin watch.

They only logged the IP. That’s metadata. IIRC Apple refused backdooring its phone encryption. That’s a lot more invasive.

Definitely not a fad. It’s used all over the industry. It gives you a lot more control over the environment where your hosted apps run. There may be some overhead, but it’s worth it.

How does it distinguish itself from GitLab?

Back when I was new to Linux, NVidia cards were not well supported. Any upgrade could break X11, every reboot a gamble. Sometimes I would have to change a config (trying to get X forwarding working etc.) and then not backing up the last three working configs would result in just nuking the install and hoping that resolves it.

Sure, it’s IT teams that don’t want to support it. I’m lucky enough that our IT supports all major OSs and so we can more or less choose. Most tools certain jobs require however do dictate the OS. For SW development Linux is absolutely feasible.