Its not docker’s fault, its the fault of the stack of crap that is needed to run it(WSL and co). My point is that it isn’t worth the trouble. I could figure it out myself, but dev containers don’t bring enough value to my team to justify the investment, and I really dont want to spend a bunch of time troubleshooting issues related to it not just for myself, but for everyone on my team. I played that role before, and it is exhausting to have to do that on top of the other things I need to do.

Docker is really great for CI, for deployments, etc. I really like it, and i have spent a significant chunk of my career developing expertise in it. Its not something I would recommend locally unless you have no other choice, or you’re running Linux and are able to use it natively.

I write Java mainly, not python, but I understand why python specifically might be easier with docker even though virtual env exists and works fine on Windows. To be clear, docker is a fantastic tool, and it has its use cases, but a local dev environment outside of Linux is a recipe for pain.

Every time I try to install it, I have to spend a bunch of time figuring out how to make it work, not to mention VPNs breaking it, and the tooling to run it changing every six months. The VM that it runs in on Docker desktop is largely undocumented, so you dont know how you can even log into it and troubleshoot, much less fix the issues that arise. This isn’t a robust tool, this is a hodgepodge of technologies that are duct taped together into something that can work, but is extremely difficult to fix if it breaks.

I don’t know why your experience is different, but don’t assume that people don’t know what they’re doing when they say stuff like this. Just because it works on your machine doesn’t mean it works on others. You can find lots of developers with similar experiences, it’s not just me.

If you don’t want to insult me, then believe what I’m saying rather than speculating about my abilities.

That matches my experience as well. Nothing kills a developers motivation like spending time dealing with and debugging weird failures on their dev environments as opposed to actually working on the things they care about.

The fact that you have to operate a VM on your machine in order to use it is a no go for me. Either use Linux as your OS in that case, or spend the time to make a dev environment that actually works. Even just mounting a directory is a painful exercise, and something that comes with performance limitations. I’ve had to deal with networking problems, drive problems, all sorts of issues that you really don’t want to waste your time fixing when you have a deadline coming up.

Multiple levels of virtualization, meaning you have the containerization part which is virtualizing the userspace of the VM, and the virtualization of the VM itself. Your development environment consists of multiple layers of complex, not to mention fragile technologies which is an incredibly bad idea for something you rely on heavily for your day to day work.

The people I know who have to use it run a fully fledged Linux VM and do all their work on that. That is how bad the developer experience is on Windows.

Also I’m a bit insulted that you immediately assumed that I’m speaking from a lack of experience, as opposed to years of experience supporting docker dev environments on windows and failing to find a solution that doesn’t come with severe drawbacks.

This works great, assuming you’re using Linux. On Windows this kind of a setup is a nightmare to maintain, since if something goes wrong you have to troubleshoot through several layers of virtualization and weird OS integrations to understand what’s happening. Venv is a much better solution for that.