If you do, what is your setup to run and maintain the containers? Have you experienced any problems that have been show-stoppers?

They seem like an attractive option in some cases, but I’m curious to hear how people use them general computing.

  • onoEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    LXC for:

    • Software builds
    • Command line experiments on distros other than my main one
    • Running apps with no risk of messes left behind when I uninstall them
    • Some (limited) privacy isolation when running apps that I don’t trust

    (It doesn’t provide as much isolation as a hypervisor-based virtual machine, but it’s good enough for some purposes, and much better than Flatpak.)

    Flatpak for:

    • A handful of apps that aren’t available in my distro’s package repo
    • Steam, because its runtime containers don’t play well with LXC

    (I never run apps from Flathub, because I find they usually come with loose permission settings that sacrifice the user’s security and privacy in favor of the packager’s convenience. Instead, I build my own flatpaks. Some people get a similar effect by micromanaging overrides with flatpak override or Flatseal.)

    Snap looked interesting when I looked at it a few years ago, especially since parts of its sandboxing design looked more effective than Flatpak’s. However, it was pushed out to Ubuntu users in a state that I don’t consider fit for release, and the maintainers have been painfully slow to address its issues, and its repository system is not open, so I doubt that it will ever meet my needs.

    Docker on some servers, though I intend to switch to Podman. (And you asked about desktop software, so this is a little off-topic.)

    • kyoji@beehaw.orgOPEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      I have never heard of LXC, thanks for the tip! Is LXC similiar to Docker where you need to configure the entire environment? When you use LXC for desktop software, do you always build from source?

      • onoEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        LXC puts an entire Linux distro in a container, so I can use shells, install packages, and configure/manage things like I would a virtual machine. It’s useful when I want more flexibility than the single-app model offered by docker and flatpak. I haven’t tried using it for a desktop environment (like Plasma or GNOME), but I have used it for GUI apps.

        No, I don’t always build apps from source for use in an LXC container. I usually let the guest’s package manager (like apt) install them.

        Are you aware of Qubes OS? It’s made specifically for desktop software in containers.