I am trying to switch to containers for local dev. I hate it.

It's usually a good thing to explore newer, (supposedly) better ways of doing things every so often.

As an example: When I do local PHP/MySQL dev, I've always just ran Apache, PHP and MySQL on my local dev machine. It's easy, and nearly every project I work on will have the exact same requirements on the server-side now.. And even when I had the rare occasion where I needed to run - for example - PHP 7.4 for some legacy crap - I could easily run that on a separate virtual host in Apache.

After setting up my new Framework laptop with Ubuntu 25.10, I realized.. Hey, Ubuntu's non-LTS releases aren't friendly with my preferred repo for PHP-FPM, which means loading older PHP versions for testing/dev is a no-go.

I ended up creating a post on a subreddit asking folks to convince me to not just re-load with an LTS release, and was reminded of something important:

The Linux community - especially on Reddit - is incredibly fucking hostile.

All wasn't lost, however: One person suggested containerization, and I thought.. Ok, fine. I should probably do that at some point, because people keep calling me old, and a fucking idiot for still running a non-virtual LAMP stack on my dev machine.

I'm most familiar with Docker, having used it with a handful of clients with larger sites, so I decided to load that up. I followed some tutorials just to make sure I got everything spun up right, and..

..Fuck me, why is this so goddamned slow?!

I went through hours of troubleshooting, and discovered..

..The number-one project I'd want to containerize will not perform well in Docker because of how it's development mode operates.

Virtualization is just going to be slow relative to running the full stack locally, no matter what, but.. This is extra fucking mole-asses slow. I'm talking 3 seconds load time for the admin interface, and literal minutes for the front-end.

Yeah, that's not going to work.

Of course, I'm not giving up.

I'm a PHP & JS developer: I'm used to having a shit-ton of ways of doing the same thing (and only a handful actually being the "right" way, depending on which way the wind is blowing). So.. I'm going to learn about other virtualization methods, and hope one of them will load the front-end faster than the time it takes to make a goddamned sandwich (sudo make-me-a-goddamned-sandwich).

And.. If I can't find a reasonable solution?

Well, local dev still works. It will still work for a long-ass time.. And fuck the gate-keepers and asshats who want to modernize for modernization's sake.

I have been coding for longer than some of these asshats have been alive.

My body itself may be broken, but running the dev stack without virtualization locally isn't.. So why fix it?