as VMs have a huge overhead by comparison.
Not at all. The benefits outweighs the slight increased RAM usage by a huge margin.
I have Urbackup running in a dietpi VM. I have it set for 256mb of RAM. That includes the OS and the Urbackup service. It works perfectly fine.
I have an alpine VM that runs 32 docker containers using about 3.5GB of RAM. I wouldn’t call that bloat by any means.
Translate? You know that a CPU sits idle most of the time right?
What kind of potato are you running? Also, how many hundred services do you run on it anyway, complaining about 200mb. You better off running docker on baremetal, if you are that worried.
Do you know how much RAM Windows 11 uses on idle?
WTF