I’m a retired Unix admin. It was my job from the early '90s until the mid '10s. I’ve kept somewhat current ever since by running various machines at home. So far I’ve managed to avoid using Docker at home even though I have a decent understanding of how it works - I stopped being a sysadmin in the mid '10s, I still worked for a technology company and did plenty of “interesting” reading and training.
It seems that more and more stuff that I want to run at home is being delivered as Docker-first and I have to really go out of my way to find a non-Docker install.
I’m thinking it’s no longer a fad and I should invest some time getting comfortable with it?
I would never go back installing something without docker. Never.
For a lot of smaller things I feel that Docker is overkill, or simply not feasible (package management, utilities like screenfetch, text editors, etc…) but for larger apps it definitely makes it easier once you wrap your head around containerization.
For example, I switched full-time to Jellyfin from Plex and was attempting to use caddy-docker-proxy to forward the host network that Jellyfin uses to the Caddy server, but I couldn’t get it to work automatically (explicitly defining the reverse proxy in the Caddyfile works without issue). I thought it would be easier to just install it natively, but since I hadn’t installed it that way in a few years I forgot that it pulls in like 30-40 dependencies since it’s written in .Net (or would that be C#?) and took a good few minutes to install. I said screw that and removed all the deps and went back to using the container and just stuck with the normal version of Caddy which works fine.