[wswope]

Speaking as someone with similar views to the OP: my “better solution” is to write an idempotent shell script targeting a specific Debian release/ISO that handles system setup end-to-end.

It is for nearly all intents and purposes functionally equivalent to docker, and it’s pretty trivial to port to Dockerfile in minutes. I use docker plenty for work and am fully aware of its benefits. Like the OP, I just dislike Docker’s iptables fuckery and CLI design as a matter of personal preference.

Of course, context is king, and I only do this for things I’m designing and running myself - but the larger point I’m trying to make is that you can do the whole “unambiguous file that describes the exact shell steps required to get the piece of software running, starting from a base distro”-thing without Docker in the picture.