This article does not get into the detailed pros and cons of the Docker daemon process.  There is much to be said in favor of this approach and I can see why, in the early days of Docker, it made a lot of sense.  Suffice it to say that there were several reasons why Docker users were concerned about this approach as usage went up. To list a few: A single process could be a single point of failure. This process owned all the child processes (the running containers). If a failure occurred, then there were orphaned processes. Building containers led to security vulnerabilities. All Docker operations had to be conducted by a user (or users) with the same full root authority.

Running containers without Docker is possible with Podman.

Simply put: alias docker=podman.

What is Podman? Podman is a daemonless container engine for developing, managing, and running OCI Containers on your Linux System.