I’m a retired Unix admin. It was my job from the early '90s until the mid '10s. I’ve kept somewhat current ever since by running various machines at home. So far I’ve managed to avoid using Docker at home even though I have a decent understanding of how it works - I stopped being a sysadmin in the mid '10s, I still worked for a technology company and did plenty of “interesting” reading and training.

It seems that more and more stuff that I want to run at home is being delivered as Docker-first and I have to really go out of my way to find a non-Docker install.

I’m thinking it’s no longer a fad and I should invest some time getting comfortable with it?

    • @[email protected]English
      3•1 year ago

      Concur, podman doesn’t (have to) have root, and has autoupdate and podman-compose to use docker files. Containers are cool, Docker less so.

      • @PopeRigbyEnglish
        2•1 year ago

        My biggest issue with podman is that podman-compose isn’t officially recommended or supported, and the alternatives (kubernetes YAML and Quadlet) kind of suck compared to using a compose file. It makes me way to pour a bunch lf work into switching to using podman-compose. I have no clue why they didn’t just use the compose spec for their official orchestration method.

        • @[email protected]English
          1•1 year ago

          once the containers are running after podman-compose you can use podman-generate-systemd to create a systemd services. Helped me move a rather large compose file to a bunch of services. My notes weren’t the best, sorry, but that’s the gist.It got me moved. I’ve now moved on to .container files for new stuff, which generates them on the fly. Need to move my old services over, but they work and who’s got the time…

          • @PopeRigbyEnglish
            1•1 year ago

            How do you like the .container files? I hate the idea of having different files for each container, and each volume. They also don’t even support pods and the syntax is just terrible compared to YAML.

            • @[email protected]English
              1•1 year ago

              Not sure yet, agree it’s not as nice to look at as YAML, but at least it’s prettier than the alternative systemd.service implementation, and it’s been rock solid so far. Time will tell, I’m sure pods will come and it seems to be what redhat sees as their direction. A method for automatically generating them from docker YAML (and hopefully vice-versa) would go a looong way towards speeding adoption.

              • @PopeRigbyEnglish
                1•1 year ago

                How do you feel about having to specify a different file for all of your containers and volumes? Has that annoyed you at all? I agree that pods are really nice, and they should give you a way to generate them from compose YAML.

                • @[email protected]English
                  2•1 year ago

                  How do you feel about having to specify a different file for all of your containers and volumes?

                  I have made my peace, it’s the price of not giving docker root. I just open a Kate session and it’s all there, nicely broken into sections.

    • @EnderMBEnglish
      1•1 year ago

      I’ve regrettably only heard of Podman in passing. At work we use docker containers with kubernetes, is this something we could easily transition to without friction?