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Windows Containers, owing to how NT itself is put together, are incredibly awkward to use. Container images have to go all the way down to smss.exe (the NT equivalent to init), which ties you to a particular kernel patch level.

Upgrade the container host? Re-bake your container images. It's a massive pain in the ass.

Yeah, I wasn't familiar with that (being all day working with Linux containers), and past week I found you cannot build images nor run Windows containers unless the host and the image match on the major Windows release. No backwards compatibility either.

So, for example, you cannot run a Windows 2019 container in a Windows 2025 host (nor the other way around). So, upgrading a base image means upgrading all the containers running in that host, and also the host itself.

Not dead on arrival, just extremely expensive on arrival for commercial/production use-cases, unless you're using Windows Containers on Azure.

They're missing things like winget as well, but that's mostly an inconvenience rather than a blocker.

Not dead, but they are ridiculously buggy. Much like WSL.