Comment by hiAndrewQuinn

You're going to be setting all that stuff up either way, though. It'll either be in a Dockerfile, or in a Vagrantfile (or an Ansible playbook, or a shell script, ...). But past a certain point you can't really get away from all that.

So I think it comes down to personal preference. This is going to sound a bit silly, but to me, running things in VMs feels like living in an apartment. Containers feel more like living out of a hotel room.

I know how to maintain an apartment, more or less. I've been living in them my whole life. I know what kinds of things I generally should and should not mess with. I'm not averse to hotels by any means, but if I'm going to spend a lot of time in a place, I will pick the apartment, where I can put all of my cumulative apartment-dwelling hours to good use.

Yes, thank you for answering on my behalf. To underscore this, the decision is whether to set up all of your dependencies and configurations with a tool like bash, or to set it all up within Docker, which involves setting up Docker itself, which sometimes involves setting up (and paying for) things like registries and orchestration tools.

I might tweak the apartment metaphor because I think it's generous to imply that, like a hotel, Docker does everything for you. Maybe Dockerless development is like living in an apartment and working on a boat, while using Docker is like living and working on a houseboat.

There is one thing I definitely prefer Docker for, and that's running images that were created by someone else, when little to no configuration is required. For example, running Postgres locally can be nicer with Docker than without, especially if you need multiple Postgres versions. I use this workflow for proofs of concepts, trials, and the like.