> it is no longer reproducible
The problem I have with this is that most of the software I use isn’t reproducible, and reproducible isn’t something that is the be all and end all to me. If you want reproducible then yes nix is the only game in town, but if you want strong versioning with source controlled configuration, containers are 1000x easier and give you 95% of the benefit
> docker still needs to run on a system
This is a fair point but very little of that system impacts the app you’re running in a container, and if you’re regularly breaking running containers due to poking around in the host, you’re likely going to do it by running some similar command whether the OS wants you to do it or not.
For some I'm sure that's the case; it wasn't in my case.
I ran docker for several years before. First docker-compose, then docker swarm, finally Nomad.
Getting things running is pretty fast, but handling volumes, backups, upgrades of anything in the stack (OS, scheduler, containers, etc) broke something almost every time - doing an update to a new release of Ubuntu would pretty much always require backing up all the volumes and local state to external media, wiping the disk, installing the new version, and restoring from the backup
That's not to talk about getting things running after an issue. Because a lot of configuration can't be done through docker envs, it has to be done through the service. As a consequence that config is now state
I had an nvme fail on me six months ago. Recovering was as simple as swapping the drive, booting the install media, install the OS, and transfering the most recent backup before rebooting
Took about 1.5 hours and everything was back up and running without any issues