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Not to be snarky but Docker (+ Hub) is mostly just packaging with some isolation to avoid conflicts, right? So why would you recommend packages from "regular" package managers (as seen in the installation instructions) but not Docker? (This is a serious question, maybe I am missing something.)

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Because Docker is a really shitty way to package applications. You don't package the application, you package an entire linux distro, with it's packages, and your application into a single opaque blob. Normal package managers just package your application in a more simple manner which works in conjunction with your OS, not on top of it.

It makes sense to package and isolate the base system since it avoids any "hidden state" that could influence the behaviour of your program and introduce hard-to-debug errors.

And it's not packed into a single opaque block: You can specify an image to derive your image from and Docker will overlay-mount your image on top of the base image, avoiding the need to store multiple copies of a base image.

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