Well, the vast majority of people aren’t running operating systems that require the use of docker or even really support it. So now you’re looking at 5% of users who would need to install docker.
Of those users 90% are running Debian. So you insert apt install docker into your script. The remaining .4% are using red hat. So you insert yum install docker into your bash script.
Then you add a line to start your image, now put the bash script on your website, voila, single file program that works anywhere.
I'm really confused by this statement.
The vast majority of people are probably running: Windows, Mac os, Ubuntu, arch, (then others).
All of those support docker - the only ones I can think of that don't are freebsd (mostly people's NAS OS?).
Then there's mobile, but I usually ignore this, since most of my dev is in the biology in ML with large-ish data (few TBs?) side.
Most users here using the software may not understand anything about software dev, so they need it to work on a laptop with an external hard drive - no cloud compute or cloud storage (to keep cost low for them) - but it can't have any long lists of commands to get something working.
One command to install and run docker seems to be a decent solution, but the program to do that needs to be accessible from any OS without gaurantee of docker being installed.
Of those users 90% are running Debian. So you insert apt install docker into your script. The remaining .4% are using red hat. So you insert yum install docker into your bash script.
Then you add a line to start your image, now put the bash script on your website, voila, single file program that works anywhere.