I don’t agree with the premise of your comment about containers. I think most of the downsides you listed are misplaced.
First of all they make the user dumber. Instead of learning something new, you blindly “compose pull & up” your way. Easy, but it’s dumbifier and that’s not a good thing.
I’d argue, that actually using containers properly requires very solid Linux skills. If someone indeed blindly “compose pull & up” their stuff, this is no different than blind curl | sudo bash which is still very common. People are going to muddle through the installation copy pasting stuff no matter what. I don’t see why containers and compose files would be any different than pipe to bash or random reddit comment with “step by step instructions”. Look at any forum where end users aren’t technically strong and you’ll see the same (emulation forums, raspberry pi based stuff, home automation,…) - random shell scripts, rm -rf this ; chmod 777 that
Containers are just another piece of software that someone can and will run blindly. But I don’t see why you’d single them out here.
Second, there is a dangerous trend where projects only release containers, and that’s bad for freedom of choice
As a developer I can’t agree here. The docker images (not “containers” to be precise) are not there replacing deb packages. They are there because it’s easy to provide image. It’s much harder to release a set of debs, rpms and whatnot for distribution the developer isn’t even using. The other options wouldn’t even be there in the first place, because there’s only so many hours in a day and my open source work is not paying my bills most of the time. (patches and continued maintenance is of course welcome) So the alternative would be just the source code, which you still get. No one is limiting your options there. If anything the Dockerfile at least shows exactly how you can build the software yourself even without using docker. It’s just bash script with extra isolation.
I am aware that you can download an image and extract the files inside, that’s more an hack than a solution.
Yeah please don’t do that. It’s probably not a good idea. Just build the binary or whatever you’re trying to use yourself. The binaries in image often depend on libraries inside said image which can be different from your system.
Third, with containers you are forced to use whatever deployment the devs have chosen for you. Maybe I don’t want 10 postgres instances one for each service, or maybe I already have my nginx reverse proxy or so.
It might be easier (effort-wise) but you’re certainly not forced. At the very least you can clone the repo and just edit the Dockerfile to your liking. With compose file it’s the same story, just edit the thing. Or don’t use it at all. I frequently use compose file just for reference/documentation and run software as a set of systemd units in Nix. You do you. You don’t have to follow a path that someone paved if you don’t like the destination. Remember that it’s often someone’s free time that paid for this path, they are not obliged to provide perfect solution for you. They are not taking anything away from you by providing solution that someone else can use.