FreeBSD now builds reproducibly and without root privilege

Jails provide the same sort of primitive as cgroups et al wrapped up into the concept of an OCI container, yes. But lack the entire ecosystem of tooling and services that go around those.

Saying jails are a meaningful alternative to containers completely misses most of the ways in which people actually _use_ containers. The experience as-is is closer to a lightweight VM or LXC than what people associate with containers.

I say this as the kind of stubborn person that invested the time to spin up a cluster of FreeBSD machines running Hashicorp's nomad as a task orchestrator to manage running jails published to my "repository" across the cluster and recreate the general "container" experience. So my experience may be out-of-date, but this isn't from a place of ignorance or lack of love for FreeBSD, but from a place of "I've managed a colossal pile of bash scripts to recreate the container experience with jails and, no, for the average person it's not fair to call it the same thing.".

https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/containers-zones-jails-vms/