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Comment by unethical_ban | Hacker News Reader

Not arguing that point for this image, but I use containers as lightweight VMs, not only as stateless-horizontally-scalable-try-to-be-google app servers.

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Docker is awesome for making virtual desktop systems. My dev environment + all required IDEs and apps is a docker image running xrdp, x2go, and google remote desktop, and my home directory is mounted as a volume. Works great!

Now when I need to move my dev environment to another computer (travel), I just copy the home dir, docker build, and I have the exact same environment ready to go.

My dev environment is 100% deterministic, backed up to git, and serves as documentation for what I need installed to do my work. If I find I need something else added, I modify the Dockerfile, commit, rebuild and redeploy. If something messes up my environment, destroy and rebuild is only a couple of commands away.

For anyone interested: https://github.com/kstenerud/docker-desktops

Thanks for posting that!

I didn't know about the --init flag to docker run, thanks! Looks like that was added last year with 1.13.0. Going to have to try this myself, now.

For the record, LXC containers are much more cooperative as non-emulated VMs than Docker containers. I'm sure this is also the case with Virtuozzo, etc. (though I haven't tried them). These other container systems function nearly identically to an emulated VM, which is what most people actually want out of containers -- thin VMs.

It's stupid that you've been downvoted. It is so tiresome to see people ask such useless questions like "what? you want to use this thing in some way that my tiny brain cannot envision? what is this madness?"

His reply was snarky and created a false dichotomy. The 90% usecase exists in between “lightweight VM’s” and google scale horizontal app deployment. Consider that the former is just as much an outlier as the latter. This post is about a pragmatic minimal Ubuntu base image, which would meet neither case well.

It was snarky. But there is a dichotomy: It's either stateless or stateful. Either I'm supposed to SSH to it or I'm supposed to destroy and redeploy.

Again, consider that you are creating this dichotomy, not the tools, or vast majority of practitioners in this space. Docker comes with (and encourages) lots of ways to persist state, as do orchestration environments like Kubernetes and ECS and you should choose the approach that suits the problem you are solving. If you want containers as lightweight VM's, there are a ton of ways to do that and they are actively supported.

I'm reluctant to get off-topic here, because the narrative relating to the actual post should be "Does it makes sense to have openssh in a minimal ubuntu base image", to which the answer is "No, obviously".

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