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LXD is now under Canonical

linuxcontainers.org

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Re: LXD is now under Canonical

#181

Post by thecosmicfrog »

mkj wrote: post #167
botanical wrote: post #88

Ubuntu is already the major contributor to LXD. What's peoples aversion to snaps in the thread? For me it makes for a stable system that allows me to run the latest version of apps in a confined space, it's actually perfect

My objection is that it's simply fragile and overcomplicated software. Operations that one would expect to be instant take a second to run. I attempted to reinstall snap recently so I could use lxd (which seems good itself), and was greeted with inscrutable error messages so gave up and moved it all over to libvirt. Contrast with something like systemd that also has its haters, but it is solidly written software so s…

> fragile and overcomplicated

Couldn't that description be applied to the existing Linux packaging ecosystem? It seems that "fragile and complicated" dependency graphs are exactly what Snap/Flatpak/AppImage are trying to fix.

Re: LXD is now under Canonical

#182

Post by w1ntermut3 »

capableweb wrote: post #95
botanical wrote: post #88

Ubuntu is already the major contributor to LXD. What's peoples aversion to snaps in the thread? For me it makes for a stable system that allows me to run the latest version of apps in a confined space, it's actually perfect

AFAIK, snaps don't have a (official) way of disabling auto updates which means everything run a snap might update at any time, rather than when the best time is. This might work fine for a personal computer you use for Facetime or whatever, but in a professional environment or for servers, you can't just let software update when it thinks it time to do it, you need to figure out a good opportunity for it to happen.

Yes they do: https://snapcraft.io/docs/keeping-snaps-up-to-date#heading--...

Re: LXD is now under Canonical

#183

Post by generalizations »

3np wrote: post #102
generalizations wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you use alpine for the host os as well as the vms? Been concerned that musl would prove a handicap. Also, can confirm void is amazing on the desktop.

Can confirm alpine works fine as a libvirtd/kvm/qemu hypervisor, fwiw. The one gotcha to be aware of here is that libvirtd as of now has two ways to be operated: Either run just the monolithic libvirtd service, or individual subsystems like virtstoraged. Trying to do both at the same time will cause issues. Due to the limitations of OpenRC compared to systemd for interdependent and interoperating system services like…

Nice, thanks. Though I was going to try using Xen on there, rather than kvm - any experience/thoughts on that?

Re: LXD is now under Canonical

#184

Post by zacksiri »

micahcc wrote: post #41
psanford wrote: post #10

LXD is really great software. The majority of the contributions already come from canonical, so I doubt this will make much difference in the trajectory of the project. I will say that I prefer running LXD on NixOS hosts where it isn't packaged as a snap. Hopefully canonical doesn't somehow break that.

Why LXD over podman? I've found podman to be a pretty great docker lite.

If you use LXD you don't need Podman, the main difference between LXD and Podman is LXD runs System Containers while Podman runs Application containers.

One advantage of having a system container is you can use a package manager to update your applications. With Podman, you have to replace the entire container, with LXD you can just "PATCH" the container. This results in much faster upgrade / lifecycle management.

You can read about this on my blog post. https://zacksiri.dev/posts/why-i-created-pakman

Re: LXD is now under Canonical

#185

Post by 0cf8612b2e1e »

pjmlp wrote: post #125
0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were I Microsoft, a custom Linux would be exclusively for server side benefits. Better/more integrated Azure tooling, native VS Code Remote Development containers, improved telemetry, native account/security provisioning, etc. No reason to tempt fate with better cross platform desktop efforts.

They already have that, https://github.com/microsoft/CBL-Mariner https://www.infoq.com/news/2023/06/azure-linux-cbl-mariner/

TIL. Truly strange times.

Re: LXD is now under Canonical

#186

Post by hendersoon »

LXD is fantastic software, makes spinning up VM-like containers extremely easy. I used it for several years before moving to proxmox for a more mature manageable solution.

Agree it would be vastly more popular and interesting if it didn't require snap.

Re: LXD is now under Canonical

#187

Post by teekert »

SSLy wrote: post #176
teekert wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Not yet, but it's fairly simple, I now have 1 week of NixOS experience ;) I installed with the graphical installer, choose Gnome, added some specific things like darkmode and many packages to the configuration.nix. Then I read about Home Manager and put packages under there.

OOTB the Gnome install was as good as can be. It's a nice way to play with Nix, batteries included.

Right now I need to deploy a server used for bioinformatics, and I need Conda... And that is a pain [0], so again I'm on the fence: Deploy Ubuntu or NixOS and persevere... I'm thinking Ubuntu, then perhaps later in the learning curve I go for Nix or perhaps just make a container to use on Nix.

[0] http://www.jaakkoluttinen.fi/blog/conda-on-nixos/

Re: LXD is now under Canonical

#188

Post by tssva »

leetnewb wrote: post #130
znpy wrote: post #120

Does that mean that lxd is dead?

I think this is the correct question to ask. Or perhaps, does it mean Canonical is reducing its support for the lxd project?

Or perhaps they are increasing their support for it and want it in house before investing more.

Re: LXD is now under Canonical

#189

Post by 3np »

generalizations wrote: post #183
3np wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can confirm alpine works fine as a libvirtd/kvm/qemu hypervisor, fwiw. The one gotcha to be aware of here is that libvirtd as of now has two ways to be operated: Either run just the monolithic libvirtd service, or individual subsystems like virtstoraged. Trying to do both at the same time will cause issues. Due to the limitations of OpenRC compared to systemd for interdependent and interoperating system services like…

Nice, thanks. Though I was going to try using Xen on there, rather than kvm - any experience/thoughts on that?

Nope, but I'd be keen to learn of your results.

I was also aiming for Xen initially. However, my host just crashed (can't recall the exact dump) when I tried running a Xen kernel - Alpine or not. I never confirmed if it's due to the Intel N5105 lacking the proper CPU extensions to support Xen or if I could hope to hassle the machine vendor for a firmware update to get it working.

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