So containers have been standardized for a while now (OCI), and even if you install “docker” it’s actually just installing containerd with docker-cli. For years kubernetes is not even supporting docker-shim anymore. So there should be no issue. What is even the problem you are running into?

TrueNAS will remove VMs the next release. It still supports containers directly.

Edit: apparently I misremembered that and its untrue.

Both. Also some concepts may exist in one language and not the other.

It’s not feasible. A project can have 10s or 100s of thousand lines of code and it takes months to really understand what’s going on. Sometimes you need domain specific knowledge.

I read through those installers that do a curl gitbub... | bash. Otherwise I do what amounts to a “vibe check”. How many forks and stars does it have? How many contributors? What is the release cycle like?