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I will play devil's advocate to your comment and say that it's my impression that the benefits of Docker are such that I can use whatever I want, including OS X

I will play devil's advocate to your comment and say that it's my impression that the benefits of Docker are such that I can use whatever I want, including OS X, and let the containers be whatever OS suits them. So if I want to do my primary development on a Mac but my prod environment is CentOS, it doesn't really matter since my container is Ubuntu anyway. And I get to use my nice, native toolchain for development, like BBEdit, or whatever I really want.

sp332 12y ago
But containers aren't completely isolated. In particular, they share a kernel with the host OS. (And the file system, I think?) So you need to have software built with the right system calls, not to mention compiled for the right hardware architecture.
dorfsmay 12y ago
I think you are confusing containers and VMs. Containers use the kernel from the hosting machine, so if you want to use a container on a non-native host, you have to use a VM. VM technology is advanced enough that you can do development on a non-native platform, but it won't be quite as smooth, and adding containers on does complicate things quite a bit, because you now have a container running in a VM running on the native platform, having to deal with three layers of networking etc...