> 1) It's strongly connected to Canonical and Ubuntu. This is mostly a matter of perception and it is an actual community project. However, I can understand people not feeling comfortable with "snap install lxd".
Last time I tried it on Fedora it did not work (less than 6 months ago).
Also it offers nothing I want over podman with --rootfs
I've tried both podman and lxd with success but I'm curious, what do you use a tool like that for, mostly?
Not to seem like a hypeman for Kubernetes and similar tools, but I actually seem to only ever use containers combined with something like Kubernetes or Docker Swarm. What do you do that you want to do specifically on one machine? Hosting something? Automation à la CI/CD?
Again, I am actually asking for good use cases without orchestration platforms, I am just curious.
I use it as a replacement for situations where I used to use KVM for Linux VMs. For example, my tvheadend and Zoneminder servers are both running inside LXD containers so that I don't pollute my host machine's environment. It's also a nice way to try out another distro other than what the host machine runs with close-to-metal performance.
> I've tried both podman and lxd with success but I'm curious, what do you use a tool like that for, mostly?
I use podman for dev and test environments, CI and CD workers and testing OCI containers that I eventually deploy in K8S. No production use cases. Hoping to soon see K3S working inside podman though, and then I would use it for deploying K3S :)
That isn’t a good comparison. While podman can run systemd inside a container, it isn’t widely adopted in the images in docker hub and elsewhere. There is probably just fedora supporting this. Whereas in LXD it’s normal to run a full systemd inside a container.
How do you mean? I've used podman on Void Linux, openSUSE, GitLab CI, and I think some others that I'm forgetting (I distro hop a lot) and it's worked great.
> While podman can run systemd inside a container, it isn’t widely adopted in the images in docker hub and elsewhere.
With podman and rootfs it's also normal to run a full systemd inside a container and you don't need special considerations from OCI images for rootfs to work just fine.
> There is probably just fedora supporting this.
RHEL is behind podman and I will take RHEL support over Canonical every day.
Podman is also available on most major distros and easy to port to new ones without requiring someone to use some proprietary crapware solution like snappy.
Last time I tried it on Fedora it did not work (less than 6 months ago).
Also it offers nothing I want over podman with --rootfs