It's kind of odd that GitHub is asking people to pull an image from a Docker account that most people won't recognize (admiralawkbar/super-linter), as opposed to an official GitHub one.
admiralawkbar accounts for 80% of the commits in the repository and over 98% of the code churn. I'm guessing this was a side project of his (Lucas Gravley aka admiralawkbar) and the docker image was just something that was overlooked when it became an officially advertised GitHub repo.
I'd rather not run a linux VM for this, so yes. It should be possible to isolate it to /opt/github-linter/* on my BSD machines, or put into a nix package.
(Also, I guess this is one more reason that docker is a big red flag for 'hastily hacked together unportable software that would be hell to ship.')
I'm 100% fine with running this and similar tools with docker to avoid polluting my machine with dependencies / un-uninstallable cruft and also to allow the people making such tools to concentrate on the tools and not supporting installation on 30 different platforms. Hell, docker even works on windows these days.
And then you'd need to figure out how to install that new version side-by-side with the existing one, or otherwise you will upgrade and break the existing setup of a lot of people. That is also not always trivial, especially if you have an existing setup like e.g. system python + pyenv managed python. Should the linters then be installed via the system package manager? How would you handle that across many different platforms? And now you multiply all that effort by the number of linters you are packaging, because almost none of them share a common toolchain.
It just opens a whole box of problems, that do nothing to actually further the tool you are building.
Installing Docker is so easy, and it’s significantly easier than installing individual tools when we’re talking about shared tooling and local development. But hey, you do you!
I'm about to uninstall Docker. I have a 128GB Macbook Air and it's taking up 17 gigs after some light use. I'll be using it from CI instead. I like it but it isn't a no-hassle option. It depends on the project whether it's easier. I prefer to avoid it if I can.
On the contrary: Docker is currently the best way, bar none, of distributing tools like this one to developers. Kudos to the Super Linter developers for doing this right.
Regarding "cross-platform": Docker for Windows used to be really terrible IMO (relied on VirtualBox, did not translate WSL paths, etc). I never managed to get the networking between VirtualBox, WSL and applications (e.g. Chrome running in Windows) working properly.
Thankfully Microsoft rewrote WSL 2 in a way that makes it work much better with Docker.
I've also had some bad experiences with Docker for windows but that was quite a few (2+ years ago) - since then it's mostly been smooth sailing for me, even without WSL
