I'm in the camp that uses Docker almost entirely as a cross-platform (cross-distro, at the very least), very clean (i.e. everything ends up in one place and the

I'm in the camp that uses Docker almost entirely as a cross-platform (cross-distro, at the very least), very clean (i.e. everything ends up in one place and the location of all data & config is very well documented and easily configured in a standard way for pretty much all packages) package manager. I could probably get similar benefits from learning, say, dpkg and systemd really, really well... but then that'd only work on dpkg-using Linux distros. Meanwhile, docker commands, docker-based shell scripts, and docker-compose files work just about identically ~everywhere, and can even work nearly-transparently on systems that don't actually support linux containers, like macOS and Windows, via virtualization and some command shims. I hardly even care that it uses containers. The parts of it I like don't actually require that—though they do encourage people packaging for Docker to document things well and to cut through a certain amount of various packages' config bullshit. Take Samba—it's like 100x easier to configure & manage for common use cases using Docker than most distros' default packages & config files. There's no actual reason that needs to be the case, it's just that the process of containerizing it brought that as a side-effect, but that's one of the main reasons I'm using Docker, not the containerization per se.