Yeah, there were ways to get them if you had to have them, but I wasn't committed enough to keep up with checking and paying a premium. The reality is that I have more older ones than I use already, along with multiple other devices that could be used as servers if I had a use for everything.

It's really just because I have a silly need to buy tech for no reason (and yes, I bought one when I got the email).

I've been wanting to get one or two for some projects, but because of the prices and scarcity, I ended up just buying an old mini PC. It was like $60 and I can do a lot more with it than a pi (at least for home server projects).

If I understood correctly, Docker is a software to maintain containers. Containers are ready to go images that can run on top of your base os, like virtualisation but in a more direct way, for exemple by sharing the kernel with the os, making it lighter and way more efficient than full virtualisation

Apparently not cause it's super easy to find. Searching "docker" on Google returned it as the top result for me. it's a container platform. You have code and it needs somewhere to run. That could be on your computer but that's ineffective at handling package conflicts. So you run it in a container. This means you can install the specific versions of dependencies that the code needs and you're least likely to run into conflicts. You can also run multiple instances of a program regardless of whether it would allow it because each instance runs in its own container. Blissfully unaware of the others

It's lighter than a VM but a bit heavier than aiming to run an application natively (and all the dependency & configuration hell that entails).

Basically a convenient way to package and run applications with all their dependencies, without regard for what libraries & configurations exist in the host OS and other containers.

If your application only works with up to version 42 of the Whatchamacallit library, you ship it with that version of Whatchamacallit, the underlying OS doesn't need to install it. Other containers running on the system that depend on that library don't get broken since they're packaged with version 69 which works fine for them.

Meme answer:

Docker isn't virtualization. It's a way of packaging applications, their dependencies and configuration. Docker containers can be run together or segregated based on configuration. Essential in much modern software- no more this dependency for x clashes with that dependency for y / 'works on my machine' / I can't install that version.

The containers share a host Linux kernel (which is virtualized on non Linux systems). Docker runs fine on ARM but only using arm containers. It's tricky to run x86_64 containers on an arm host, especially with a different OS