No, client-only means Devpod is contrasting itself to Coder, which requires a central server to orchestrate the containers it creates. Devpod does not. It does still have dependencies, though, among them Docker.

Like, oh you need to install this extremely heavy tool on your server... but yeah it's still client-only, trust me?

No, client-only as in this is the client only. You need a corresponding server. Are you thinking of "runs locally"?

Mate, if you need to install something on a server how the hell can it be called client-only??? eMacs is an example of client-only perhaps, with TRAMP as it works purely on top of SSH , though you could argue it still isn’t client-only as it requires the SSH server to be enabled… so I thought the SSH connector for this would also work the same way but it also requires a full freaking Docker install not just SSH. This is totally misleading.