I didn’t mean it that way.

If you have a spare computer, install proxmox on it.
There are loads of tutorials how to do this, it has a good installer, after which it’s all a web based GUI.
Use it to spin up VMs to your heart’s content, create scripts to automatically provision a new Ubuntu or Debian or whatever flavour. Or run up some Windows VMs. You can pass through GPUs and other devices (tho this can be difficult, again lots of tutorials out there).

Be prepared to spend some time learning proxmox. It took me 2 or 3 installs to figure out the best way to set up networks, storage etc. Mostly cause I just jumped in, found something that could be better, googled that and found a useful tutorial on it so started again.
But once proxmox is running, everything else become so much easier

I have worked with Docker/WSL for a number of years and it is more difficult compared to Docker in Linux. There are a lot a unique quirks and bugs that are an absolute pain to deal with.

Would not recommend for any relatively complex use case and certainly not for a server.

This sounds like ports aren’t forwarded correctly. At least that’s a regular problem I have. ss -tunlp shows which ports are open and helps me often to find out if I’m just too dumb again ;D

I do think that if you continue to set up services on Linux (with or without docker), you’ll get quickly to a point where setting up a new service takes only a few minutes.

You forgot “sudo”! Try again