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.
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 to say that Snap packages makes LXD unusable, it's simply to complex, to messy. Canonical also have Microk8s (I think) which is packaged as a Snap, rendering it completely useless. The mental overhead required to make it function completely eliminates the point.
It also completely ignores highly regulated businesses, because Snap does not care and will just roll out an update whenever it feel like it.
I don't particularly like Snap, but I can see the use on desktops. For the server side... I don't know anyone who'd thinks it's neat.
https://snapcraft.io/docs/keeping-snaps-up-to-date#heading--...
If there's an option, live with it and change it.
I can't see what's so destructive about snaps. It's probably another echo chamber when people find a common target to yell at.
The packaging is very limiting, and I don't want to have to fight against the system to get a version of software installed that works.
I personally used to run MicroK8s (snap based). I finally gave up about 6 months ago. Were snaps the root cause? Eh... no, the root cause was dqlite synchronization problems that I was tired of dealing with, but snaps made the whole process so much worse. They're hard to automate, they're hard to interact with using normal tooling. They just aren't part of the system in the same way, and while I understand there's value there (hell - I'm running containers and microk8s for a reason) there's also pain. K8s was an okish trade on that front: I felt a lot of pain and gained a lot of value.
Snaps seem to be falling into the worst possible spot: I'm feeling a lot of pain and the product is usually not any better at all (and sometimes much worse).
HA Microk8s with snaps and nvidia-container-toolkit (The GPU addon) just isn't all that stable (I would consistently get hard lockups on some hardware). That same hardware running Arch and k3s is chugging away beautifully.
So maybe it is an echo chamber - but the echoes I keep hearing are system admins saying this is making life harder and they don't understand the upside, and Canonical pushing forward anyways.
---
So maybe there's light at the end of the tunnel somewhere for snaps. Maybe the grand vision will eventually come and folks will be fine with it. But my suspicion is that Ubuntu is being replaced at most orgs before then.
Steam is throwing weight behind Arch (LOTS of new linux users coming in here). Alpine is a strong contender in containers. Nix is interesting.
Both Flatpak and AppImage seem to achieve the "easy user installs" part without all the pain of snaps, and they're neutral on whether I use them or not.
Basically - if snaps were so good (even if they're only good in some cases) I would expect a conversation about snaps similar to that of SystemD - Strong arguments on both sides, real advocacy from the community for the product, even if it's painful to adopt, or doesn't meet all user needs.
Instead snaps are just "meh" all around. There's a steady stream of folks leaving, and no real advocates outside of Canonical. At most - you have neutral folks like yourself who just don't mind snaps.
To me - that's a bad sign. I bailed. It wasn't worth betting my personal projects on. I've been pretty happy with the decision too.
The implementation is shit.
Things take 10 times as long to start.
There are annoying 'Turn off firefox so snap can update it' messages. Nothing happens when you stop firefox, you'll just get the same message a few hours later.
Shutdown is going to take ages for some reason because it's waiting for snap to do something.
I don't give two shits about whatever snap is trying to do, but having to wait 10 minutes for my workstation to be useful whenever I want to reboot is not what I'm about.
So far it's very snappy! My Ubuntu 18.04 machine somehow "rotted" in ways that previous installs didn't -- everything became slow and janky, sorta like Windows
And I specifically installed 18.04 in 2021, to avoid Snaps
But now it looks like Debian will work great
That is, IIRC, you get (say) Firefox via Debs in Pop. Canonical wants to install it via Snap.
IMO Flatpak is a great option for a set of desktop software where packaging across distros may be problematic for some reason. I use the Firefox Flatpak on Fedora / RHEL because it doesn't disable the video codecs, for instance. The native package doesn't have some codecs enabled.
Canonical is (AIUI) pushing Snap for desktop and server software. And Canonical is the only source of Snaps, I believe? With Flatpak you get Flathub but AFAIK anybody could set up a repo of Flatpaks.
You can use them side-by-side on the same system. Install a dozen of each and take some measurements.
For those who don't get the reference: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snap,_Crackle_and_Pop
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 on.
I have suspend/wake working well so far, USB-C charging + screen + all peripherals via 1 USB-C cable, all "media" buttons work. And this is still on 8 GB of ram (soon the 2x32 GB will arrive ;)), I haven't even heard the fans so far! I'm on Teams, camera works, nobody would even know I'm on Linux if it wasn't for my constant evangelizing!
I'm really impressed (yeah, I know, Linux people easily are when it comes to desktops, basically we're impressed if things work).
I did enable AppIndicator. Solaar, NextCloud and Tailscale all really require it to be considered functional. I don't understand why that is not a standard thing (it is on many distros though).
... 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 severely.
So, I am happy that it is good for you, but it is not something I'd choose.
...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.
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.
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.
https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-epoch
When I can I'm creating servers with Debian too, personal ones and for customers. The only problem there is that Letsencrypt uses a snap to update the certificates, even on Debian [1]. Not all my servers need a web server but when they do I usually use ngnix. I'm investigating alternative update clients with no hurry. When that is solved, goodbye to Ubuntu.
[1] https://certbot.eff.org/instructions?ws=nginx&os=debianbuste...
> If you have any Certbot packages installed using an OS package manager like apt, dnf, or yum, you should remove them before installing the Certbot snap to ensure that when you run the command certbot the snap is used rather than the installation from your OS package manager.
Yes, it is more work, but since then I've been upgrading Debian and it just gets better!
Oh man, this reminds me of two years ago. During Covid lockdowns, I figured I'd try Ubuntu, see what's up with gnome. This was 20.04. I was pretty meh, but it was okay. Then I found out about Regolith [0], which is a "spin" or whatever it's called, that comes with i3 (like Kubuntu has KDE instead of Gnome).
I don't know exactly why, and I was too lazy to dig, but that thing was one of the most sluggish experiences I've ever had. At the time, I'd daily drive an i5-6500 with integrated graphics, and my regular Arch with i3 and light Picom effects (blurring for notifications and dimming inactive windows) worked great on the integrated GPU. Somehow, the Ubuntu version was worse on a newer i5-8500.
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...
Also, can confirm void is amazing on the desktop.
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 this, I stuck with the monolthic libvirtd approach and it's been running fine so far.
Monolithic libvirtd (which is disabling the systemd libvirt) is the way to go.
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.
Main benefits is setting up a new machine is much easier, and updates are easier because almost all the normal configuration is managed by nixos (in the nix language) as opposed to regular files floating around etc.
>The LXD section on the LinuxContainers community forum will slowly be sunset in favor of the Ubuntu Discourse forum run by Canonical
A lot of useful lxd information are in forum.Stephane and the team is super helpful there.
Also snap auto update kills my containers so I had to put on held.
They also had just fixed a long standing bug that makes rebooting lxd container sometimes fails due to snap messing up with zfs mounts.
SnapD is always the top process. I actually started a migration to Archlinux, which has LXD as native packages. Insane. I know.