> Why does it have to be “containerised” at all? Why can’t the software be directly installed on a *nix virtual machine? I am very interested in this upcoming

> Why does it have to be “containerised” at all? Why can’t the software be directly installed on a *nix virtual machine? I am very interested in this upcoming space. I had set up devbox.io for local development, and it even offers the concept of services. Like a docker compose for local development, just directly on the host. Nasty and hairy stuff like Python is still best shoved into a container to be done with it, but even there we are seeing a move to venv by default (Debian 12+), which should solve a lot of issues, making *nix more viable again. So I guess the main distinction so far is that containers are more performant, at less isolation than VMs, and containers have a gigantic ecosystem of build tools. It's easy to build a OCI image. Everyone and their mother has put together a Dockerfile by now. Not so with VMs. That might change if nix catches on and we get proper tools to fully describe VMs a priori. I reckon technology is already good enough to make VM startups performant enough (Firecracker, ...)?