For me the power of docker is its inherent immutability. I want to be able to move a service around without having to manual tinker, install packages and change permissions etc. It’s repeatable and reliable. However, to get to the point of understanding enough about it to do this reliably can be a huge investment of time. As a daily user of docker (and k8s) I would use it everyday over a VM. I’ve lost count of the number of VMs I’ve setup following installation guidelines, and missed a single step - so machines that should be identical aren’t. I do however understand the frustration with it when you first start, but IMO stick with it as the benefits are huge.

And I've done the exact opposite moves everything off of lxc to docker containers. So much easier and nicer less machines to maintain.

I've never really like the convoluted docker tooling. And I've been hit a few times with a docker image uodates just breaking everything (looking at you nginx reverse proxy manager...). Now I've converted everything to nixos services/containers. And i couldn't be happier with the ease of configuration and control. Backup is just.a matter of pushing my flake to github and I'm done.

I'm actually doing the opposite :)

I've been using vms, lxc containers and docker for years. In the last 3 years or so, I've slowly moved to just docker containers. I still have a few vms, of course, but they only run docker :)

Containers are a breeze to update, there is no dependency hell, no separate vms for each app...

More recently, I've been trying out kubernetes. Mostly to learn and experiment, since I use it at work.

Docker compose plus using external volume mounts or using the docker volume + tar backup method is superior

I used docker for my homeserver for several years, but managing everything with a single docker compose file that I edit over SSH became too tiring, so I moved to kubernetes using k3s. Painless setup, and far easier to control and monitor remotely. The learning curve is there, but I already use kubernetes at work. It's way easier to setup routing and storage with k3s than juggling volumes was with docker, for starters.

I love docker, and backups are a breeze if you're using ZFS or BTRFS with volume sending. That is the bummer about docker, it relies on you to back it up instead of having its native backup system.

Docker is a convoluted mess of overlays and truly weird network settings. I found that I have no interest in application containers and would much prefer to set up multiple services in a system container (or VM) as if it was a bare-metal server. I deploy a small Proxmox cluster with Proxmox Backup Server in a CT on each node and often use scripts from https://community-scripts.github.io/ProxmoxVE/. Everything is automatically backed up (and remote sync'd twice) with a deduplication factor of 10. A Dockerless Homelab FTW!