Running Docker on non-Linux platforms requires a Linux VM to run in the background. It's not as cross platform as people make out. The other container technologies can be managed via code too, that code can be shared to public sites. And you can run those containers in a VM too, if you'd want.

What's more, with ZFS you could not only ship the container as code, but even the container as a binary snapshot, very much like Docker's push/pull but predating Docker. Even on Linux, for a long time before Docker, you could ship container snapshots as tarballs.

Also worth mentioning is that early versions of Proxmox even had (and likely still does) a friendly GUI to select which image you wanted to download, thus making even the task of image selection user friendly. This was more than 10 years ago, long before Docker's first release and something Docker Desktop still doesn't even have to this day.

> Because docker container are called container for this reason. That comes from the boat container analogy.

The term computer "container" predates Docker by a great many years. Containers were in widespread use on other UNIXes with Linux being late to the game. It was one of the reasons I preferred to run FreeBSD or Solaris on production in the 00s despite Linux being my desktop OS of choice. Even when Linux finally caught with containerisation, Docker was still a latecomer to Linux.

Furthermore, for a long time Docker wasn't even containers (still isn't strictly that now but it at least offers more in the way of process segregation than the original implementations did). Albeit this was a limitation of the mainline Linux kernel so I don't blame Docker for that. Whereas FreeBSD Jails and Solaris Zones offered much more separation, even at a network level.

If we are being picky about the term "container" (not something I normally like to do) then Docker is the least "container"-like of all containerisation technologies available. But honestly, I don't like to get hung up on jargon because it helps no-one. I only raise this because you credited the term to Docker.

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Now to be clear, I don't hate Docker. It may have it's flaws but there are aspects of it I do also really like; and thus I do use it regularly on my Linux hosts these days despite my original reluctance to move away from Jails (Jails is still much nicer if you need to do anything complicated with networking, but Docker is "good enough" for most cases). However what I really dislike is this rewriting of history where people seem to think Docker stood out as a better designed technology - either from a UX or engineering perspective.

I personally think what made Docker successful was being in the right place at the right time. Linux was already a popular platform, containers were beginning to become widely known outside of the sysadmin circles but Linux (at that time) still sucked for containerisation. So it got enough hype early on to generate the snowball effect that saw it become dominant. But lets also not forget just how unstable it was, for a long time it was frequently plagued with regression bugs from one release to another. Which caused a great many sysadmins to groan whenever a new release landed.

(sorry for the edits, the original post was a flow of thoughts without much consideration to readability. Hopefully I've tidied it up)