Development Containers is described as 'A development container (or dev container for short) allows you to use a container as a full-featured development environment. It can be used to run an application, to separate tools, libraries, or runtimes needed for working with a codebase, and to aid in continuous integration' and is an app. There are six alternatives to Development Containers for a variety of platforms, including Linux, Mac, Windows, Docker and Flathub apps. The best Development Containers alternative is DevPod, which is both free and Open Source. Other great apps like Development Containers are Flox.dev, Jetify Devbox, devenv and OpenBoot.
DevPod is a client-only tool to create reproducible developer environments based on a devcontainer.json on any backend. Each developer environment runs in a container and is specified through a devcontainer.json. Through DevPod providers these environments can be created on any backend, such as the local computer, a Kubernetes cluster, any reachable remote machine or in a VM in the cloud.
https://containers.dev/supporting