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Comment by Hallucinaut | Hacker News Reader

I was looking at this just last night and the story with Ubuntu is horrible. That's essentially going to be stuck on v3.4 for ten years because it's "a lot of work" to get into that distribution.

You'd think an entity the size of RedHat trying to take the reins from Docker would understand that this is an investment they have to make to make it a first-class replacement.

I also installed it on Windows to see how the WSL engine works but now it conflicts with my existing v3 Podman installation on Ubuntu 20.04 in WSLv2 so I guess I'm out of luck.

Also may be of interest to people here but Podman desktop had a release yesterday. It's pretty primitive and I couldn't get it to work to use my existing auth.json but it's there.

It was a pretty frustrating experience when all I wanted was to be able to "podman login" to a local repository so Jib would pull down base layers correctly.

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Red Hat has no official affiliation with Canonical who make Ubuntu.

If you want to test podman you 'll have better luck using an OS from the Fedora ecosystem where Red Hat has affiliations and is actively contributing.

Since you mentioned Windows I 'd suggest trying something like this [1] or this [2]

[1]: https://github.com/yosukes-dev/FedoraWSL [2]: https://github.com/WhitewaterFoundry/Fedora-Remix-for-WSL

Disclaimer. I am not using Windows to test above solutions anymore. More than a year ago I used [2] but from a casual look maybe [1] is better now.

Personally I followed the rootfs way of installing Fedora to WSL2. It was simple enough and worked fine (including podman). I found no reason to use external tools / scripts / modified distros.

Sadly, some anti-cheat tools in games still refuse to work with WSL2 (they hate Hyper-V, I guess it's been used as attack vector), so back to VMware Player on my personal workstation and using terminal to open Linux shell.

I wonder why Fedora doesn't provide an official WSL package on the Microsoft Store as other distros do. My guess is that they feel that the WSL kernel and init diverge too far from the Fedora kernel and systemd. Can anyone from the Fedora project comment on this?

What would be the benefit for Fedora, given that it seems like non-trivial effort?

No, it's not kernel related.

It's because Fedora strives to be open-source and free software only. WSL isn't completely libre so they can't support it officially and neither is the Windows Store. There's third party Fedora images for WSL you can install.

https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/legal@lists.fe...

The reason is that Microsoft wanted indemnification agreement and Fedora refused to provide it.

More here: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/legal@lists.fe...

There's also Arch, or basically anything else besides Ubuntu. Podman isn't the only thing that is chronically out of date on it. Ubuntu has definitely lived long enough to become the villain.

If you install the podman package via Scoop, you'll get a `podman` client shim, and then if you run `podman machine init` it'll automatically set up a WSL instance running Fedora with Podman set up and relay the necessary sockets for you so that running `podman ps` or whatever on Windows Just Works™.

Then if you want to can run `wsl -d podman-machine-default` to log into the distro as normal. You can also copy the distro, import/export/register it as usual if you want a clone unaffiliated with the podman package per se.

What the official Windows Podman installer, also official Podman Desktop that installs Podman and scoop's Podman package should really do is offer to integrate with your existing WSL2 distro like Docker Desktop does.

The way that Docker Desktop integrates is just one extra step away from `podman machine init`, since Docker Desktop just does the same socket relaying stuff for your existing WSL distros as it does for Windows. The actual Docker daemon only runs on the special distro that the tool (Docker Desktop or `podman machine` or whatever) sets up.

I assume that Podman Desktop does that but idk because I don't use it. Rancher Desktop also works this same way.

In all cases, the integration with existing distros happens inside the GUI app. Maybe I'll check tomorrow whether Podman Desktop offers comparable integration.

But yeah, it's a good integration to have because the native Windows CLI experience is still so impractical and clunky that many developers end up setting up a pet distro in WSL and pretty much living in it as their default terminal session. Good integration with cmd.exe or (pwsh.exe running under Windows Terminal, for that matter) is cool but it doesn't mean much to someone who does all their work in an Ubuntu WSL VM or whatever.

I don't think GP was suggesting any official affiliation between Red Hat and canonical. I think they were making a point that there's a lot of potential users on Ubuntu who might switch to podman if it were available. When trying to establish a project, user acquisition is a critically important part.

I agree with them. I think Red Hat should be making effort to get podman working well in Ubuntu (well, Debian but would benefit Ubuntu). Although it's very possible that Red Hat is trying and have met resistance. Canonical wants for a very different direction and it wouldn't surprise me at all if they were throwing road blocks in the way (or at least, doing nothing to remove the road blocks).

Looks like Debian is doing that work, but only in experimental for now...

https://packages.debian.org/source/experimental/libpod

Some context/discussion and an experimental ppa for Ubuntu:

https://github.com/containers/podman/issues/14302#issuecomme...

I used Arch and have access the pretty much the latest release of Podman anytime. Your qualms with Ubuntu packaging don't make a lot of sense. Any distro has requirements to become an official packager. Canonical and Ubuntu have been pushing LXC/LXD as their container solution. If they wanted the latest version of Podman then their packagers can build and package it, or someone else can and create a repository or PPA.

Also, I was able to get it to work on Windows fine. Maybe try removing your existing install and creating a new one.

> I was looking at this just last night and the story with Ubuntu is horrible. That's essentially going to be stuck on v3.4 for ten years because it's "a lot of work" to get into that distribution.

They used to provide relatively recent builds in their kubic repos. Unfortunately, for some reason, they decided to discontinue it[0]. They mentioned some CVEs or something in some issues raised around this, but to me that means pushing a new version/build and not discontinuing it.

Anyway, one of the members of the Containers org provides unstable kubic repos[1][2] for non RH systems. Unfortunately, this includes RCs, and non-stable versions, which is fine to get bleeding edge, but I'd rather just have the stable versions.

Due to the above, I've written some scripts to build deb packages for all the latest stable versions. So hopefully you can simply download the deb from GH releases[3] and then `dpkg -i *.deb && apt-get install -f`.

[0] https://podman.io/blogs/2022/04/05/ubuntu-2204-lts-kubic.htm...

[1] https://github.com/containers/podman/issues/14302#issuecomme...

[2] https://build.opensuse.org/project/show/devel:kubic:libconta...

[3] https://github.com/hoshsadiq/podman-deb/releases

Ubuntu has nothing to do with Podman / Redhat. Ubuntu also has a terrible track record of not aligning where it makes sense with other distorts and not properly testing packages - it's just a bit of a flaky distro in general.

> . Ubuntu also has a terrible track record of not aligning where it makes sense with other distorts

You mean not aligning with Red Hat and what they're pushing on everyone else. Ubuntu is on a shorter release cycle compared to Debian so they're usually the first non-Red Hat distro with new stuff. Systemd vs Upstart, Unity vs GNOME (3?), etc.

They try to do new stuff, and there's nothing wrong with that. Not everyone should blindly follow RH's lead. Systemd was objectively shit at the beginning, run by a person who was actively hostile to any feedback he didn't like. There were multiple highly critical bugs whose patches weren't backported ('just update' as if it's that easy with the sprawling beast that is systemd).

> not properly testing packages

What do you mean? I only recall one popular instance of an issue with Ubuntu packages, and it's when they released a major upgrade to Samba because backporting a critical security fix to the previous major version, the one that came with the distro originally, was too hard (in their words), which ended up breaking Samba for a bunch of people.

Ubuntu isn't "flakey". It makes a different tradeoff compared to RHEL - slightly newer version of stuff for slightly less stability. For many orgs that's preferable to obsolete 10 year old versions of most software for amazing stability.

> obsolete 10 year old versions

Talk about hyperboles. RHEL 8 is from 2018 and has had considerably more updates than Ubuntu 18.04. In fact some packages might even be newer than what is in 20.04.

But you have Ubuntu 22.04 if you want newer versions of everything.

You also have RHEL 9 then.

Maybe, but plenty of RHEL8 packages still package versions from 10+ years ago.

It was forked from Fedora 5 years ago and it has versions from 10+ years ago?

Can you name a few specifically?

Red Hat introduced modules with RHEL8, meaning they can easily make available more up-to-date versions of software if necessary. It's still not bleeding edge, but eg. PostgreSQL 13 was released on 2020-09-24 and that's available with support in RHEL 8 as a module. Similarly, you have eg. PHP 8, Ruby 3.0 and other software released after RHEL 8's initial release.

Modules are much nicer to use than the previous software collection system because they actually replace the "original" package, so it's just a straight version upgrade without having to worry about fixing configuration files etc. if it's compatible.

The trade off of modules, which it pays to be aware of, is that they have different support lifecycles to the distro they are in. They publish a list that is updates as new modules are released.[1] what this means in practice is that some appstream modules may only have a year or two of support, while other may have until distribution release EOL. For example, in RHEL 8 PHP 7.4 is supported until 2029, almost 9 years after released as a module, but earlier 7.x versions and 8.0 which are also modules have lifecycles that range from 18-24 months.

There's a lot of flexibility in this to support both those that need newer versions of things as well as older stable versions, just be aware and choose and plan accordingly.

1: https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/rhel-app-st...

I don't understand, Ubuntu releases new releases every 6 months? If you want the latest Docker/Linux kernel/whatever, just download the latest Ubuntu. They may be behind on one or two packages but that's it.

Normally you could also grab the releases from the source directly and let the upstream source figure out compatibility for you. However, it seems like the folks over at Podman have discontinued their external repository, so I guess they don't care about bringing new versions to Ubuntu either.

> You'd think an entity the size of RedHat trying to take the reins from Docker would understand that this is an investment they have to make to make it a first-class replacement.

Nah, red hat probaby cares very little about that.

Red hat probably cares about delivering the best it can for its users (red hat, centos and fedora users).

Podman probably has no explicit goal of replacing docker, it only has the goal of providing a workstation container management implementation. Which might happen to be an awesome substitute for docker.

I don't think Podman developers are even really strongly integrated into Red Hat OS development goals. They create something that can be packaged and works on most Linux distros. I do think that Podman does try to be a replacement for docker though, and that is why they have the podman-docker layer. They may not outright say it because of the Docker licensing fiasco, but with Podman Desktop it is clear that they are pushing for an alternative to Docker.

I can't comment on Podman specifically, but Red Hat's approach to the projects that they choose to focus on in the "Red Hat ecosystem" seems to be to just do development in upstream first and then whoever is working on the distros packages it for Fedora and/or RHEL. I don't see why they should put resources into packaging in their upstream projects; it doesn't seem to me that they're hostile to other distros packaging their software.

Packaging is a distro problem, not an upstream one, though upstreams should of course work with distro maintainers to make packaging frictionless.

They are frantically working to be the alternative to docker.

Just give them enough time and it will run in Ubuntu just fine.

Obviously it will happen after they get it feature complete on their own OS.

Given the amount of work need to achieve feature parity with docker (which I suppose Docker Inc tough was it's moat), they have no viable competition right now and so this strategy makes sense.

Could you file a bug to podman desktop https://github.com/containers/podman-desktop/issues about your auth.json file / "podman login" ?

Ubuntu just imports the package from Debian, there it's also still on 3.4 and will be removed by the end of the month

https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/libpod

> I was looking at this just last night and the story with Ubuntu is horrible. That's essentially going to be stuck on v3.4 for ten years because it's "a lot of work" to get into that distribution.

Ah shit, thanks for the heads up, I'm in the process of upgrading (actually, on a test snapshot) a client's Ubuntu 14.04 LTS to 22.04 LTS and migrating everything to containers running on podman.

Their IT department is crap so instead of creating a new VPS on top of RHEL or something and switching the DNS entry, I have to stay on Ubuntu Server, which I hate.

Yup that's pretty annoying. Docker offers official repos to always have the latest version, wish podman will offer something similar.

Let me guess, Podman desktop is an Electron app.

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