@gsuberland I guess, to me at least, it depends on what you make of it.

There are containers that lean into the possibilities (an executable along with the absolutely required dependencies, maybe a dozen megabytes or two) and then there are "containers" that are just virtual machines in disguise (a full Ubuntu installation + runtime environment, source code and the aforementioned build system, so maybe a gigabyte)..

I think the former are a decent way to package services (but not tools).

@jwarlander if you release your currently-Linux-only service as some code, a binary, and a text file describing install steps, I can probably port it to FreeBSD with no special knowledge.

if you release your service as a container I need to learn how your chosen container system works and reverse engineer the install requirements and steps from your compose file or whatever, and likely need to do extra work to get the build working in the first place.

@gsuberland Oh! Yeah, definitely, containers aren't great as a general release method for software intended for others to use!

When replying above, I came from the context of my own situation - developing and deploying our own services that we run at work, in our cloud environment.