As a Developer I want to be able to have a proper out of the box experience with Windows Containers

While tying the whole Windows containers developer experience to the Docker world is understandable, given its mindshare across the GNU/Linux world, since the Docker Desktop license changes this has become quite problematic developer experience.

Not only were Windows Containers already a hard sell, due to their limitations versus UNIX container models, having to have the whole Docker Desktop license as part of the advocacy discussion, makes them even harder to push for, and many organisations rather go for the easier route of having a couple of Windows VMs instead.

While I am aware of the runtime alternatives on Windows Server documentation, this is quite far experience from the much easier "Add/Remove Windows Features" that Windows developers are comfortable with, and quite low level DYI kind of approach.

Not sure if this is for license reasons, lack of resources, or whatever management reason, however ideally we would have a Microsoft own tool that would replicate Docker Desktop experience.

We would go into "Add/Remove Windows Features", select the necessary container related features, and be done with it.

All the necessary GUI, CLI and Windows services would be readily available, without going into the Internet trying to puzzle out the developer experience, or having to buy additional products required to use the OS container infrastructure.

Start by reading the linked Windows Server container setup documentation and comparing its runtime, GUI, CLI, and Windows service steps with the proposed Add/Remove Windows Features experience. Done would require a defined Microsoft-supported tool or feature set that provides the requested out-of-the-box Windows container workflow without the current manual setup or Docker Desktop dependency.