The whole point of my post is that running a container otecshstration system to accomplish any of this, for someone new, is insane. It is absolutely 100% only adding complexity and making things more confusing. How many people will not realize these utilities are on every computer they use? How long until someone poisons these repacked uselessly opaque versions? This makes things easier for no one and only furthers to complicate things by adding unnecessary complexity.
If someone is on a Mac, then they are now running a Linux VM, then running containers, then logging into said fucked up environment and then finallly... running... awk?
macOS -> Linux -> Container Runtime -> SSH-> finally use awk, sed, head, or anything else. Why stop there? We can probably then start up Qemu from a container, boot MacOS, and then simply repeat the process for maximum usefulness.
Err, no, they are not doing this. That's not how it's working for a start (there's no SSH here) but the user experience is literally
Install a standard application, downloaded like any other.
Open terminal.
Run "docker run ..."
That's it.
> It is absolutely 100% only adding complexity and making things more confusing. How many people will not realize these utilities are on every computer they use?
They aren't on every computer, and they are different on different computers. A point the author not only talks about in the linked explanation but describes how that bit them.
In the context of making things hard for a tutorial or complex for a beginner, it not being visible is the key point. Just like the complexities of how your CPU actually works aren't relevant for this tutorial.
Sure, this case where it's just coreutils + csvlookup, the benefit for the added abstractions isn't so great. Using docker like this makes more sense if there are more dependencies. (Maybe it's just easier to say "use docker" than to explain how to install a dependency on different OSs?).
In general, I think it's fine for people to be able to solve problems without having a full understanding of the mechanisms involved in getting the tool to work. If they need to know it later, they'll learn it then. This is a top-down approach -- But, naturally, there'll be some awkward solutions on the way.