If you are just wanting to try out minecraft single player, just get the client on whatever PC you'd be playing it on. Servers are only necessary for non-lan multiplayer. If you like it and want to do non-lan multiplayer, I'm sure whichever of those docker containers will do the trick, you'll just need to make sure your client and server use the same version. You can get pretty deep into just minecraft server stuff, but installing the client is the only thing necessary to try it out. I'm not sure if you can use the client for free, but it is necessary to play the game. Have fun!