I am not really certain why. The installer is kind of spartan, yes, but it is not difficult to figure out. And not only is the system pretty simple, the documentation is really good, too.
I recently inherited an old laptop that would have ended up in the trash otherwise, and I installed OpenBSD on it. The battery is busted, unfortunately, but otherwise installing the system and setting up XFCE was pretty straightforward.
The community can be a little tough on newbies at times, but if one plays by their rules, they are a very friendly and helpful bunch.
In fact, it asks the same questions as a typical Ubuntu install: keyboard language, timezone, username + password, partitioning, network. They throw in a couple more questions about enabling NTP and SSH.
> And not only is the system pretty simple, the documentation is really good, too.
I think that newer users of Linux are not used to searching for documentation in man pages, instead they go look for an answer they can copy-paste off of Stack Overflow.
Unfortunately, we see this for (some, newby) system administrators, too. I guess this is the typical issue with "getting it work" versus "getting it right".
I'm not really sold on the way Docker specifically tries to be fire-and-forget easy (it often succeeds in being silly and you have to work around it), but containers are good.
There's a lot of very useful software that just expects that it can do whatever it wants on a system, like install its own dependencies from git, run its own version of python etc.
You may want to run such software in production and it is an absolute maintenance nightmare if you install all the dependencies via package management. Upgrading starts with rebuilding and repackaging all dependencies. Not fun, and not a good use of time.
For such software, containers make it feasible to administer as somewhat manageable units: You create the Dockerfile or whatever to install the software you want, and run the resulting image on a host, and bring configuration in via puppet or something. Then, when you need to upgrade, you rebuild your image and deploy it on the host; rollbacks are trivial, as is scaling, or creating test environments.
You can of course achieve the same sort of thing with virtual machines providing you have good orchestration. However, often a deployment can consist of multiple software components that are separate units, but can (or must) share a single host.
I think so long as Linux containers don't actually offer real security, that's the niche where they are useful.
I do not disagree entirely, but I would add that they've probably learned to do this because most linux distributions* are not very well documented -- in comparison to BSD systems, which are known for their amazing handbooks, man pages, etc.
*: Excluding (of course) Arch, Gentoo, and (Last I checked) Slackware
E.g "My wifi is broken, where do I start?"
Then Google, and StackOverflow, and others came along and it was very easy to slip into the habit of just searching for answers.
When you use OpenBSD there isn't necessarily a lot to be found online, other than mailing list archives. But remember to look at the man pages and the OpenBSD FAQ[1] they will usually have the answers you need.
It is a bit funny that it takes less time to run the installer and copy the needed files to /etc for our firewall than to re-image a disc. Same with our domain name servers.
OpenBSD hearkens to the older school of thought that reading the docs is not a bad thing and in fact can be a great place to start. It reminds me of my start on UNIX puzzling out the mysteries of UNIX one man page at a time.
You are in a maze of twisty little man pages, all alike.
[0] http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi/OpenBSD-current/man4/...