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LXD is now under Canonical

linuxcontainers.org

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Re: LXD is now under Canonical

#171
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, we migrated to LXD from Proxmox for stateful containers for various servers (DNS, Zulip, Mastodon) as well as user desktops (e.g. Ubuntu Desktop, Fedora, etc). LXD is nice because it has a nice management layer. It is really easy to migrate an instance (container or VM) and its state from one physical machine to another on the LAN, even if you don't want to bother with setting up an actual cluster.

I think that LXD as a Proxmox alternative is a very underrated idea to be honest. Don't get me wrong, Proxmox is a pretty good piece of software, but if your workload isn't tailored to VMs + you have private links between your clusters + you have shared storage, you end up adding way too much complexity to your stack even tho you aren't using the real useful features that Proxmox provides. So if you are in the "I jus…

Please note that Docker and LXC (and LXD by extension) are essentially the same technology packaged differently, with different yet overlapping use cases; in fact, early Docker Engine was based on LXC before they switched to containerd.

Therefore I don't think there is anything that can run on LXC/LXD but not on Docker (and vice versa); it's more a matter of preference, whether you want a long-lived persistent virtual system (LXC/LXD) or ephemeral single-application containers with optional persistence (Docker).

Still, nothing stops you from using LXC/LXD for ephemeral containers and Docker for long-lived systems, but you'd be using the non-optimal tool.

Re: LXD is now under Canonical

#172

Stéphane Graber's work is fantastic and LXD had a lot of potential. But Canonical managed to drive me away from it with that abomination called Snap and its auto updates that could bring down a cluster without warning.

I run LXD on snap. It used to be straight up LXD using .deb. The switch has caused the host to continuously have a load of 3+.

SnapD is always the top process. I actually started a migration to Archlinux, which has LXD as native packages. Insane. I know.

Re: LXD is now under Canonical

#173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Gnome is so sweat ... Sweet? I don't like GNOME. I don't like GNOME accessories; I hate CSD and hamburger menus and that big empty wasted top panel. I want more things vertical, while GNOME is moving its vertical workspace-switcher to horizontal. The Cosmic tiling is good. That's an improvement. GNOME's window management sucks, and this is better. I also really don't like systemd-boot and it broke one of my laptops…

Arg yeah sweet indeed, pronounciation is just no guide at all in English (neither in Dutch btw)... ...Seat, sweat, chaste, caste, Leigh, eight, height, Put, nut, granite, and unite. ... [0] And I do agree on the very high amount of pixels wasted in the top panel, expecially on an ultrawide monitor, something MacOS does better. On a laptop screen it's ok for me. [0] http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html

:-D A wonderful poem. When I was a TEFL teacher, I sometimes tortured advanced students with it.

As for the panel... well, Dash-to-Panel tames it:

https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1160/dash-to-panel/

... but it does not handle vertical mode well. E.g. Status icons should be in rows, not a single column.

Re: LXD is now under Canonical

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever used it in a production / server environment? One of the problems I have with Snap is that it does auto-updates. So you can't control when updates are performed. Furthermore, you can only use Canonical's repository. So if you want to use a custom build of some sort, you can't - unless you pay big bucks to Canonical.

It's funny because I found a way to disable auto update for snaps in 2 minutes by Googling and half of the angry voices in gere are because of auto updates. What is going on?

There is this announcement about a new snap release from November 2022 [1] in which they made this possible. So this is a relatively recent addition. Before that, Snap basically did everything in its powers to ensure that all packages were continuously updated.

1. https://snapcraft.io/blog/hold-your-horses-i-mean-snaps-new-...

Re: LXD is now under Canonical

#175
We use canonical tech in 3000 nodes in 4 different data centers. I would be afraid if LXD is going to be locked with juju for orchestration. Juju is not something the industry has been using and it is the source of most our problems e.g. performance overhead, scalability issues and juju not being mixable with other orchestration tools.

I wish LXD team try to keep it open and stop entangling lxd with the rest of canonical tools.

We do not deploy lxd on scale using snap. We build it and have as part of our packer pipeline on rockylinux 8.

Re: LXD is now under Canonical

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have tried it, and reviewed it. I kinda like the window tiling, but it's still GNOME and GNOME is still a pain. As a cleaned-up Ubuntu, I like Zinc. https://teejeetech.com/2022/05/07/zinc-22-04/ Ubuntu, with the smallest cleanest but richest desktop on Linux -- Xfce -- and neither Snap nor Flatpak. Instead, `deb-get` which finds and installs native DEB packages, configures the repos for you, manages updates and so…

I was on KDE for a bit, love it on my ultrawide monitor with tiling. But on my laptop Gnome is so sweat. I have a 2nd hand HP ProBook and I swear, for the very first time ever in my Linux life the trackpad feels like my MacBook trackpad. 3 fingers swipe up, overview of windows, another swipe is app grid, swipe left right, move to other desktops. I really find the whole experience very smooth and I enjoy it a lot (all…

Do you have a git repo somewhere with your configuration.nix?

Re: LXD is now under Canonical

#177

Stéphane Graber's work is fantastic and LXD had a lot of potential. But Canonical managed to drive me away from it with that abomination called Snap and its auto updates that could bring down a cluster without warning.

I agree. Snap is the weak point of LXD. I have been using it in production servers and until

snap refresh --hold

was made available my team went through the pains of snap workarounds [1]

The LXD team was very proactive in the support side but the truth is that Snap is a pain and without --hold it would be possible for production servers to break out of a sudden due to uncontrolled updates (who did every think that this was a good idea?).

LXD itself is a very good project because it uniformizes the use of containers and VMs with a friendly CLI - the syntax is more intuitive than the one from Docker, by the way. We recently managed to combine LXD and Puppet to manage containers and VMs in a declarative way. I am a big fan of the LXD project.

Somebody else commented here that the latest Debian makes LXD available in the normal distribution packages - that is something worth checking.

[1] - https://discuss.linuxcontainers.org/t/repeatable-lxd-install...

Re: LXD is now under Canonical

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is really sad that more people aren't aware of LXD, because it is a really good solution of a number of projects and it's really well done. On Snap... Even if you like Snaps packages, I can't imagine that you'd feel like it's a good choice for LXD. For a browser or email client, sure it's a solution, I suppose, but for thing like LXD it just adds an entire level over complexity that doesn't help. I'd go so far at…

`snap refresh --hold` will hold updates indefinitely https://snapcraft.io/docs/keeping-snaps-up-to-date#heading--...

You've been able to specifically schedule refresh times and interval's for awhile now. We did it monthly at a specific time and then set a calendar event with a couple notifications to keep track of it. IMO the "I can't turn off the updates" concern is overblown. If you aren't patching your systems ever you have problems anyways.

Re: LXD is now under Canonical

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

`snap refresh --hold` will hold updates indefinitely https://snapcraft.io/docs/keeping-snaps-up-to-date#heading--...

You've been able to specifically schedule refresh times and interval's for awhile now. We did it monthly at a specific time and then set a calendar event with a couple notifications to keep track of it. IMO the "I can't turn off the updates" concern is overblown. If you aren't patching your systems ever you have problems anyways.

Overblown? Tell that to people that were hit with production outages. The whole idea of automatic updates for software running critical workloads is so stupid that I lost all respect for Canonical as a vendor.

Re: LXD is now under Canonical

#180

I hear a lot of people complaining about Snap. While I am not a Ubuntu user for 15+ years, I am curious why Canonical is pushing Snaps so much. There must be positive feedback from their target market. Maybe the traditional Linux desktop user does not fit anymore into Canonical’s persona

My understanding is that IoT devices are a big reason for Snap's existence.
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