Are there better alternatives for newbs who just wanna self host stuff?

Docker is great for a beginner, and even for an expert too. I've been self-hosting for 20 years and love Docker.

Back in "the old days", we'd use Linux-VServer to containerize stuff. It was a bit like LXC is today. You get a container that shares the same kernel, and have to install an OS inside it. The Docker approach of having an immutable container and all data stored in separate volumes was a game changer. It makes upgrades so much simpler since it can just throw away the container and build a new one.

The main alternative to Docker is Podman. Podman uses the same images/containers as Docker - technically they're "OCI containers" and both Docker and Podman implement the OCI spec.

Podman's architecture is different. The main difference with Podman is that it never runs as root, so it's better for security. With Docker, you can either run it as root or in rootless mode, but the default is running it as root.