In a word: convenience.

It was in the right place at the right time with easy UX. A big audience were developers not so familiar with sysadmin in the commercial software world. It provided an easy way to get a kind of executable package. Devs could throw in all their Python/Ruby/JS dependencies and not worry about it. "works on my machine" was basically good enough because you just ship the whole damn thing over.

Docker then supervised the process for you, too. The whole Docker package took care of a lot of things

PS: for those really interested in containers, I always recommend looking into Plan 9: the OS from the original UNIX team intended as a successor to UNIX. Every process has its own namespace and the whole OS is built around that concept (plus a few other core things.. too much to go into here). see also https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/~rsc/plan9.html

The benefit of docker is portability. You can run software anywhere. Rather than going through all this pain of installing and managing systemd services, you can just run a docker container, often in only one command. Docker also handles things like setting environment variables, which are sometimes used by apps as a an alternative for, or even replacement for settings filed, like in the lemmy docker example: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/main/docker/docker-compose.yml

Docker succeeds where java failed, but in a language agnostic way.

And I disagree with the author's point about disliking docker-only apps, for two main reasons. One, it isn't the developers responsibility to package things for every system, and two, docker containers are mostly self documenting, being very close to simply a shell script. I almost always look at dockerfiles, and I have only seen one or two that are not simple to extract to make them run outside docker.

For example, the lemmy docker image: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/main/docker/Dockerfile

The author acts like it's some advanced witchcraft or something, but it's just using rust to compile stuff on an debian based system. Every command used to build lemmy is right there. Then, you can look at the environment variables set in the docker compose, and set them in a systemd service or something.

How do I tag people on lemmy?

u/tony

What makes you dislike docker?

At least from a development perspecrive, it's really convenient, especially when paired with a CICD system and container registry.