I’m a retired Unix admin. It was my job from the early '90s until the mid '10s. I’ve kept somewhat current ever since by running various machines at home. So far I’ve managed to avoid using Docker at home even though I have a decent understanding of how it works - I stopped being a sysadmin in the mid '10s, I still worked for a technology company and did plenty of “interesting” reading and training.
It seems that more and more stuff that I want to run at home is being delivered as Docker-first and I have to really go out of my way to find a non-Docker install.
I’m thinking it’s no longer a fad and I should invest some time getting comfortable with it?
There are still edge cases, but things have improved rapidly the last year or two, to the point that most docker-compose.yaml files can be run unmodified with podman-compose.
I have however moved away from compose in favor of running containers and pods as systemd services, which I really like. If you want to try it, make sure your distro has a reasonably new version of Podman, at least v4.4 ot newer. Debian stable has an older version, so I had to use the testing repos to get quadlets working.