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Comment by kspacewalk2 | Hacker News Reader

>Aside from LXD and that family of technologies, which are criminally underused.

Criminally underused indeed. I have no idea why it's not more popular for 'average' users/orgs. I don't know what issues may come up with scaling this up, but in our small org we've been running 20-30 (mostly unprivileged) LXD containers in production for several years now for all sorts of intranet and external-facing services (auth, DB, web, etc). Sure, it requires a bit more thought to set up than Docker, but it's well-documented (for most people's uses at least), secure, stable and lightweight.

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>I have no idea why it's not more popular for 'average' users/orgs.

Maybe because many devs use Macs / Windows? Maybe WSL may tilt the balance in LXDs favour, but on OSX? Run it a VM yourself without the conveniences of docker-compose up?

As a Linuxuser myself, i looked at the competing solutions (podman, LXD, and the one by Canonical whose name i forgot) and thought: "Ain't gonna fly in a mixed environment."

They may be technologically superior, worse is better once again i guess. Would prefer them to Docker too.

Isn't docker running on OS X in VM anyway?

Yes it does, but it's very transparent - until you run into a few things that make it obvious, eg if you disk-image size limits, or memory limits.

I work with a few people who believed it was native, and used it for quite a while, until things started going wrong and we logged in to the vm to fix them.

Kinda my point. The reason docker is popular is simply that most of the devs are lazy, not very knowledgeable in the actual underlying technology and very short-sighted.

And docker marketing has very effectively used that to their advantage.

Yes it is, but docker for desktop runs it for you. You could use LXD etc by running Linux yourself in a virtualisation solution of your choice like VirtualBox or VMWare.

Yeah, that's my point.

On Linux you are going to run docker in VM anyway if you care a bit about security, but I know that almost all devs run docker directly on their laptops and with the user's full access to docker - ie. their user effectively becomes user. Without second thought ...

* becomes root, of course

> I have no idea why it's not more popular for 'average' users/orgs.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24782999 tongue in cheeck indeed, but better marketing it is, of course

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