general container confusion

So its been years of me not quite understanding containers. Even the fallback of trail & error hasn't helped. It's obviously a conceptual gap. This thought is prompted by how documentation for the various container technologies often goes into really odd tangents, like the time I was reading up on either LXC or D and it started out well but then it went into bizarro land going on about bridges to get net. Umm, dude: when I install a distro inside qemu there is none of this bridge stuff. What gives?

Finally, after time, I came up with a single question that may settle things, in my mind anyway, with regard to containers. I've even managed to condense it into a simple true/false question. Ready?

True or false? Containers can be used by my non-root user to seamlessly run programs from other distros.

Thank you.