What has Docker become?

In the early days we tried very hard to accommodate their needs, for example by implementing support for devicemapper as an alternative to aufs. I remember spending many hours in their Boston office whiteboarding solutions. But we soon realized our priorities were fundamentally at odds: they cared most about platform lock-in, and we cared most about platform independence. There was also a cultural issue: when Red Hat contributes to open source it's always from a position of strength. If a project is important to them, they need merge authority - they simply don't know how to meaningfully contribute to an upstream project when they're not in charge. Because of the diverging design priorities, they never earned true merge rights on the repo: they had to argue for their pull requests like everyone else, and input from maintainers was not optional. Many pull requests were never merged because of fundamental design issues, like breaking compatibility with non-Red Hat platforms. Others because of subjective architecture disagreements. They really didn't like that, which led to all sorts of drama and bad behavior. In the process I lost respect for a company I once admired.

I also think they made a mistake marketing podman as a drop-in replacement to Docker. This promise of compatibility limited their design freedom and I'm sure caused the maintainers a lot of headaches- compatibility is hard!

Ultimately the true priority of podman - native integration with the Red Hat platform - makes it impossible for it to overtake Docker. I'm sure some of the podman authors would like to jettison that constraint, but I don't think that's structurally possible. Red Hat will never invest in a project that doesn't contribute to their platform lock-in. Back when RH was a dominant platform, that was a strength. Nowadays it is a hindrance.

For example, sharing a graphics card, say a Intel A380 and Jellyfin, over docker is a TERRIBLE experience.

But the same, with a full VM, and the gfx card shared to it is easy peasy.

Now, for testing applications, docker is great. But when I decide to run a service, I'll de-dockerize OR single VM with docker inside, with cronjobs to once a week update.

And logging/monitoring is also a hell of a lot easier per machine, rather than 8 services through docker.

I'm sure if I need a full dynamic service fabric, sure go with Docker or K8s. But this is for personal and friend usage.

Docker Desktop, among other things, is not open source and is not free.

Open Core is not something that people who care about software freedoms engage in. It’s what proprietary software makers engaging in open source cosplay do.