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eli5 containers: complicated things that make a program so you can run it on anyone's computer, as long as they have a certain kind of computer

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Containers are not really complicated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cgroups

A much better eli5: https://jvns.ca/blog/2016/10/10/what-even-is-a-container/

Of course containers are complicated! The kernel's documentation for cgroups is 13 separate documents! You can't even "download" a container without a complicated tool to "manage" it on the disk! They are quite complicated.

Also, cgroups aren't containers. "Containers" is a loosely defined concept encompassing Linux's common implementations of cgroups and namespaces and chroot environments and networking and union filesystems. Complicated x5.

Also also, that eli5 assumes a lot of Linux knowledge most five year olds don't have.

> as they have a certain kind of computer

With certain kind of software installed

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