The first sign that the company you just joined is amateur hour, every hour of the day, every day of the year is that they don’t have a Staging environment.

It eliminates the dependency of specific distributions problem and, maybe more importantly, it solves the dependency of specific distribution versions problem (i.e. working fine now but might not work at all later in the very same distribution because some libraries are missing or default configuration is different).

For example, one of the games I have in my GOG library is over 10 years old and has a native Linux binary, which won’t work in a modern Debian-based distro by default because some of the libraries it requires aren’t installed (meanwhile, the Windows binary will work just fine with Wine). It would be kinda deluded to expect the devs would keep on updating the Linux native distro (or even the Windows one) for over a decade, whilst if it had been released as a Docker app, that would not be a problem.

So yeah, stuff like Docker does have a reasonable justification when it comes to isolating from some external dependencies which the application devs have no control over, especially when it comes to future-proofing your app: the Docker API itself needs to remain backwards compatible, but there is no requirement that the Linux distros are backwards compatible (something which would be much harder to guarantee).

Mind you, Docker and similar is a bit of a hack to solve a systemic (cultural even) problem in software development which is that devs don’t really do proper dependency management and just throw in everything and the kitchen sink in terms of external libraries (which then depend on external libraries which in turn depend on more external libraries) into the simplest of apps, but that’s a broader software development culture problem and most of present day developers only ever learned the “find some library that does what you need and add it to the list of dependencies of your build tool” way of programming.

I would love it if we solved what’s essentially the core Technical Architecture problem of in present day software development practices, but I have no idea how we can do so, hence the “hack” of things like Docker of pretty much including the whole runtime environment (funnilly enough, a variant of the old way of having your apps build statically with every dependency) to work around it.

Well, mucking about with configuration on a computer is a form of entertainment hence its “use” in a broader sense…

Worry not: in 20 years’ time people born in 2028 will all pretty much look like kids to you.

I have a cheap N100 mini-PC with Lubuntu on it with Kodi alongside a wireless remote as my TV box, and use my TV as a dumb screen.

Mind you, you can do it even more easily with LibreELEC instead of Lubuntu and more cheaply with one of its supported cheap SBCs plus a box instead of a mini PC.

That said, even the simplest solution is beyond the ability of most people to set up, and once you go up to the next level of easiness to setup - a dedicated Android TV Box - you’re hit with enshittification (at the very least preconfigured apps like Netflix with matching buttons in your remote) even if you avoid big brands.

Things are really bad nowadays unless you’re a well informed tech expert with the patience to dive into those things when you’re home.

I use a pretty basic one (with an N100 microprocessor and intel integrated graphics) as a TV box + home server combo and its excellent for that.

It’s totally unsuitable for gaming unless we’re talking about stuff running in DOSEmu or similar and even then I’m using it with a wireless remote rather than a keyboard + mouse, which isn’t exactly suitable for PC gaming.

Mind you, there are configurations with dedicated graphics but they’re about 4x the price of the one I got (which cost me about €120) and at that point you’re starting to enter into the same domain as small form factor desktop PCs using things like standard motherboards, which are probably better for PC gaming simply because you can upgrade just about anything in those whilst hardware upgradeability of mini PCs is limited to only some things (like SDD and RAM).