This is a very late reply, but anyway... > It really didn't seem like that big of a deal for me. Each piece of it was just a small step away from a background

This is a very late reply, but anyway... > It really didn't seem like that big of a deal for me. Each piece of it was just a small step away from a background of Linux administration knowledge I built up as a teenager when I used to distrohop and play around for fun. > You've used the word 'just' here to highlight what to you seem unreasonable levels of difficulty or required background knowledge, which makes sense. I mean, it's great that it's easy for you. And it would be great if everyone at my office conveniently had this same kind of the prerequisite knowledge. But the reality is, most don't. And the worse reality is, most don't enjoy having to learn extra tools on top of the rest of the things they need to know for their job. Docker is one extra thing to learn. It is easier to learn for the majority of developers that don't have, or don't care to have, any Linux admin background. It is a cross-platform solution and has good adoption in the industry, which means I can probably use Docker at one company, and go to another company and use the same Docker. > But couldn't I just as well say that Docker advocates would have us 'just' abandon the very notion of shared libraries Why should I want shared libraries though, given I have containers? I can get an update out by rebuilding an image and rolling the container. Immutable infrastructure is a good thing. > 'just' try to get by without actually knowing how to build or verify our dependency chains, 'just' grab binaries from strangers on the net, 'just' download gigabytes of binary data to perform builds, Gigabytes is a gross exaggeration for Docker images, but this applies to almost any package manager. Why is a package in a Debian repository (or similar) any better from a trust perspective than an image in Docker repository? Neither of the package/image maintainers are usually authors of the software. If you need/want to, you can run your own docker registry, where you only upload self-built images, which completely removes all your trust concerns. You could probably even build docker images with nix.