Nearly as unbelievable, the other way to distribute software was to publish in gaming magazines.

Yes, all the code was printed onto the pages of a magazine. And then young nerds bought these magazines and spent days or weeks manually typing in and debugging the hundreds of lines of BASIC to run some game. And then the magazine would be passed onto the next nerd, like comics and pornography.

My own miserable system was a TI 99/4a with a cassette player for data storage. It sounded like a dial-up modem. I typed in a lot of programs and stored them on tapes. Then I started tearing the developed work apart and building my own stuff. It was years before I could call myself a programmer. (I was twelve.) Line-number BASIC sorta ruined me, actually. Learning about object-oriented functions was quite difficult after starting out with GOTO and GOSUB.

Do it. Jump in. Just start with whatever you can assemble.
It’s a great way to keep your room warm.

I don’t know about the Ubuntu LCX. I don’t container much.

I’d do this with a virtual machine and TrueNAS. Those are just the tools I like to use. The TrueNAS Scale ISO will install qemu-guest-agent, so you don’t need to worry about drivers. Make sure to build it with Virtio SCSI Single disk controllers. Use one 50gb OS disk for the install. Add huge data disk(s) after the install.
Promox Disk options … SSD emulation, Discard, IO Thread, No cache … and I use Write Back (unsafe). Use the Virtio NIC.

And try it again. Hopefully faster this time.

Been working on a jukebox VM. This seems like it will mesh well. Got LMS installed. Muddling through the rest. https://community.home-assistant.io/t/how-to-build-a-lms-based-whole-house-audio-system/436016