[freehrtradical]

I share some of your trepidation but I've learned to like containers for some uses cases. In particular -- and I think this might help you have fun with learning -- I like one-liners. For example, the following downloads a "virtual machine" with a Java development kit in it, compiles a program and runs it:

  docker run --rm adoptopenjdk/openjdk11-openj9:ubi sh -c "printf 'public class main { public static void main(String... args) throws Throwable { System.out.println(\"Hello World\"); } }' > main.java && javac main.java && java main"

This is a trivial example, but I think it gets at the value of containers which is to make things self-contained.

From here on, it does get increasingly complicated and sometimes questionably so. You'll normally create a Dockerfile, add all your commands there, add separate files which you'll copy into the container. Then you might use compose, Kubernetes, nomad, or a million other technologies to actually make something more realistic and there are lots of annoyances of those.

But I think the base value for me is the idea of scripting the creation and deployment of self-contained "virtual machines". Arguably, this was done before with Ansible, Chef, etc., but there is some value to a popular, standardized approach and a huge library of images out on Docker Hub that you can simply run/pull. This is particularly useful for reproducing problems for other people to investigate, sharing toy projects, letting people explore your application, etc.