It's been a while since I last used minikube, but it was a bit slow then.
There is a new alternative called kind: https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/kind
I only tested it briefly (on linux), but it seemed faster than minikube.
In contrast to minikube, kind does not use a vm but instead implements a cluster node as a single docker container.
Learning to build your own packages is a bit of a chore, but once you get there, it could not be easier.
I suspect building your own packages for Debian or Redhat would be much more difficult.
Let alone getting that package accepted upstream, which is not that hard with Nixos.
For a newbie I think SVN is definitively easier to learn at first.
But then you have to live with the limitations.
Git is the better choice in the end, especially if there are more than a few people working on the same codebase.
I think the reason for the IE8 support is that there are still lots of old windows machines used in china.
And if you think IE8 is bad, have you ever had to support IE6? ;-)
IE 5.5 with no box models would be a contender [1]
At Social Amp (2012), I was making cross domain single-page applications for sites like 1-800-Flowers, where we had to support back to IE6, but, since a tag was missing from the main website, we had to do some hacks to "shore up" IE6 so the padding would be there.
It's feasible to have some pretty sweet JS (backbone.js, easyxdm) on IE6. The limitation came from the engine's performance, stylesheet and js caps, and really strict rules on, dangling commas (memory is a bit fuzzy in which instances, but it'd crash our whole script). In some cases, there'd be no errors, and it'd just freeze it.
People who say this rarely have tried using a SPA on IE8. As the OP said, you'll provide a better experience giving them a pain ole server rendered app.