Comment by heresie-dabord

Setting apart the collection of specific, idiosyncratic application stacks in question here, it is frustrating to see how badly computer users are being served by the commercial operating systems. I expected APPL and MSFT to make more progress in software usability in general.

We are now in an age that I call "Abusability": How much can we insult and mistreat the customer with our unfriendly software? ^_^

> I've suggested Docker as a potential solution

I recommend Podman instead because it is compatible with Docker containers but does not require root privilege.[1]

> it still requires her to take on the role of administrator and caretaker, which, in her busy world of astrophysical research, can be quite the distraction

. . . And yet

> she embarks on a week-long odyssey to set up her computing environment from scratch

She is already a sysadmin. But multiply the number of machines to maintain by a factor of 1000 for an initial model of a sysadmin's real workload.

= = =

[1] _ https://podman.io/