I’m a retired Unix admin. It was my job from the early '90s until the mid '10s. I’ve kept somewhat current ever since by running various machines at home. So far I’ve managed to avoid using Docker at home even though I have a decent understanding of how it works - I stopped being a sysadmin in the mid '10s, I still worked for a technology company and did plenty of “interesting” reading and training.
It seems that more and more stuff that I want to run at home is being delivered as Docker-first and I have to really go out of my way to find a non-Docker install.
I’m thinking it’s no longer a fad and I should invest some time getting comfortable with it?
The advantage of docker, as I see it for home labs, is keeping things tidy, ensuring compatibility, and easy to manage/backup setup configs, app configs, and app data. It is all very predictable and manageable. I can move my docker compose and data from one host to another in literal seconds. I can, likewise, spin up and down test environments in seconds too. Obviously the whole scaling thing that people love containers for is pointless in a homelab, but many of the things that make it scalable also make it easy to manage.