[sconi]

Back in Docker's day it was (basically) the only thing out there that let you reliably package up an application in a portable way from any Linux distribution to any Linux distribution - before Docker it was prohibitively difficult to build your application on your Ubuntu desktop and run it on your CentOS servers because you had to wrangle system packaging, library differences, and see the app run in the same way as it would in production. Docker turned the runtime into one consistent thing everywhere (and the ability to ship it to the deployment target).

That's less novel in 2023 but solved serious problems a decade ago. In 2023 reproducible builds are important as reflected by efforts like Debian's reproducible builds or SALSA and nix zooms way beyond that to solve downstream problems, too

[Avshalom]

Speaking as a linux user since 2004: it absolutely was not "prohibitively difficult" as shown by every application pre-docker. Beyond that, it's hardly dazzling