Doing Docker development on Windows eats away a lot of the benefit since you need to run Linux environments in a VM anyway. And yeah, you're going to have goofy stuff with line endings and file permissions. MacOS dev is better, partly because it's Unix-like but mostly because a lot of devs love their Macs enough to make Docker for Mac good enough.

There were supposed to be a lot of benefits to using Docker:

1. Build your environment anywhere and it will work anywhere. This is mostly true. Basic isolation of dependencies is a huge headache-solver for C/C++ development, Python apps, and anything with a complicated build chain. Go is a notable exception - the Go build process really did solve this without containers.

2. Process/resource/cgroup isolation. You can run multiple containers (even untrusted ones) on the same metal and they can't interact. It's like a VM but instead of committing fixed amounts of RAM and disk space (which mostly sits idle), you let the Linux kernel handle it dynamically with limits. At least that was the dream. But without carefully managing properties/permissions this is a security nightmare. When people say "why Kubernetes" this is one real answer. Almost no one trusts container isolation for actual security in practice.

3. Layered builds. This was a killer idea - you build your container in steps. The first few change infrequently and the last one or two is your actual app. You can ship the big OS-heavy layers once and push frequent small updates (a few MB) and still keep your dev and runtime environments identical. This breaks down a bit in the real world because a lot of people don't bother to layer things well - they wind up with 100MB-1GB monsters being pushed around endlessly. But also it kind of doesn't matter - you can push 1GB monsters on your own network/VPC all you want and it's not really a big deal.

4. Declarative builds - theoretically you can recreate a bit-identical build based on just the Dockerfile. This is great for auditing third-party images and reproducibility. Theoretically. But people forget that apt-get install on Monday might be different than apt-get install on Wednesday. Debian does security updates that way and an image built 6 months ago won't match one you build today. It still works, though, so we pretend not to notice. And sharing image layers with another host is actually kind of hard. I imagine Nix solves a lot of this but I haven't had the pleasure of learning it yet.

So Docker has fallen short on some promises and met others. But the truth is I can't think of a better way to build some fussy C project (the first thing I look for is a Dockerfile, and often it's easier to make one than pollute my system with dependencies). I also can't think of a better way to distribute a Python app. And being able to do "docker run debian:bullseye" is pretty slick. Golang is another story - I think it's very reasonable to say "what's the point?" with a go binary.