My least favorite thing about Windows, above all things, is that it's extremely difficult to discover what's wrong with it. People just try random things until it works in most cases.
I think Docker is a tool, and it depends on how you implement said tool. You can use Docker in ways that make your infra more complicated, less efficient, and more bloated with little benefit, if not a loss of benefits. You can also use it in a way that promotes high uptime, fail-overs, responsible upgrades, etc. Just "Docker" as-is does not solve problems or introduce problems. It's how you use it.
Lots of people see Docker as the "just buy a Mac" of infra. It doesn't make all your issues magically go away. Me, personally, I have a good understanding of what my OS is doing, and what software generally needs to run well. So for personal stuff where downtime for upgrades means that I, myself, can't use a service while it's upgrading, I don't see much benefit for Docker. I'm happy to solve problems if I run into them, also.
However, in high-uptime environments, I would probably set up a k8s environment with heavy use of Docker. I'd implement integration tests with new images and ensure that regressions aren't being introduced as things go out with a CI/CD pipeline. I'd leverage k8s to do A-B upgrades for zero downtime deploys, and depending on my needs, I might use an elastic stack.
So personally, my use of Docker would be for responsible shipping and deploys. Docker or not, I still have an underlying Linux OS to solve problems for; they're just housed inside a container. It could be argued that you could use a first-party upstream Docker image for less friction, but in my experience, I eventually want to tweak things, and I would rather roll my own images.
For SoC boards, resources are already at a premium, so I prefer to run on metal for most of my personal services. I understand that we have very large SoC boards that we can use now, but I still like to take a simpler, minimalist approach with little bloat. Plus, it's easier to keep track of things with systemd services and logs anyway, since it uniformly works the way it should.
Just my $0.02. I know plenty of folks would think differently, and I encourage that. Just do what gives you the most success in the end 👍
Personally, I'm okay with a small set of folks being rich as long as they pay taxes. I'm this case, a hell of a lot of taxes. You know, the taxes they should be paying, not what they manage to get away with now.
Let the legal system enforce that they give back to society in a meaningful way. Close the stupid loopholes. I want to see a meaningful improvement in society from their contributions. Everyone else is worse off unless they contribute.
It's more or less a consumer version of their RA2 system, which is its own protocol. The gateway interacts with the whole system using commands issued over telnet though, so you actually have a command line for operating and configuring it. It integrates with a bunch of closed systems, and it integrates right into Home Assistant with a first-party HA integration.
It's not like you can inspect the source code for their firmware push up pull requests on GitHub, so I'm this aspect, yes, it is proprietary. However, with tools like Home Assistant, which is something you probably should be using, this becomes much less of a concern, in my opinion. It's robust, high-quality, and is commonplace, so you can get bits and pieces at Home Depot.
If you're interested in something that will work with mesh networks and you aren't interested in running software like Home Assistant, you should look for Z-Wave or Zigbee hardware. Read reviews though; I've had a lot of mixed experiences with hardware, even from "trusted" vendors.
I honestly think that he doesn't have to face consequences like normal people because he has enough money to make problems go away. He can be an awful person in interviews, and mean his words too, then even bankrupt his company, and you know what? He will continue being excessively rich.
His money could be used to fix so many issues en masse. It's disgusting that he chooses not to do so every day.
Try a Lutron Caseta dimmer with a Pico remote. They work together as-is without a gateway, and the Gateway Pro will join it to something like Home Assistant in the future. Or you can simply use the Caseta app.
Why search for error codes when your operating system has every opportunity to tell you what's wrong?