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?
It took me a while to convert to Docker, I was used to installing packages for all my Usenet and media apps, along with my webserver. I tried Docker here and there but always had a random issue pop up where one container would lose contact with the other, even though they were in the same subnet. Since most containers only contain the bare minimum, it was hard to troubleshoot connectivity issues. Frustrated, I would just go back to native apps.
About a year or so ago, I finally sat down and messed around with it a lot, and then wrote a compose file for everything. I’ve been gradually expanding upon it and it’s awesome to have my full stack setup with like 20 containers and their configs, along with an SSL secured reverse proxy in like 5-10 minutes! I have since broken out the compose file into multiple smaller files and wrote a shell script to set up the necessary stuff and then loop through all the compose files, so now all it takes is the execution of one command instead of a few hours of manual configuration!