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Comment by handrous | Hacker News Reader

> I mean I felt it wasn't that long ago Vagrant was "the" tool for the job.

Vagrant is my safety hatch, in case Docker goes under and aspect of it that's "the best centralized, cross-distro, server-oriented Linux package manager repository around" is, at least temporarily, thrown into disarray. Back to picking a distro and contorting it into what I need, in that case.

And it's still better than Docker if you're really in a hurry and need to get some pile of undocumented shit running locally ASAP.

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Docker at this point is just a wrapper around OCI spec… why would you go back to Vagrant rather than just using any of the other tools that can build OCI images? Vagrant and Docker seem like fundamentally different tools to me.

At least 80% of Docker's value to me is as a consistent-everywhere, very complete server daemon package manager. Serious packages for work? They're there, and up-to-date. Screwing-around stuff for home (Minecraft server, Jellyfin, et c.)? It's all there, same interface, just a couple minutes to add and configure another daemon at approximately its latest version, and I don't even have to think about which distro I'm running.

It's the container registry that I'd miss, not the actual container functionality, and that's what would have me reaching for Vagrant and distro packages again until something similarly good arose (or maybe there already is a viable replacement, which I'd find via search in short order if I actually needed it)

I wonder what sort of container registry are you looking for. There are a few alternatives to Docker Hub nowadays. For instance, GCP’s is quite affordable and straightforward.

I don't mean for hosting custom images—I mean for using it as a cross-distro (indeed, cross-OS) very up-to-date, server-oriented package manager. That's most of what I get out of it, right now. It's currently, maybe, my favorite Linux package manager + package repository, even if that's not its core purpose.

You could, for instance, use Podman and Quay.io for your purposes and you would never need to touch anything Docker.

Vagrant can use containers, making it also a wrapper around OCI-compatible runtimes. In addition, it also supports VirtualBox, Hyper-V, VMWare, bare metal, SSH targets, and various cloud providers.

The real conclusion from your logic would be: why would you go to Docker rather than just using Vagrant?

I wasn't aware that Vagrant has Podman integration! That's pretty cool.

My point was not to defend Docker, but to suggest that Docker is increasingly irrelevant to the broader ecosystem.

I wouldn't use Vagrant because I (like many people) always target an orchestrator and not hypervisor or bare metal.

> The real conclusion from your logic would be: why would you go to Docker rather than just using Vagrant?

I use Docker as a nigh-universal package repository and package manager, with a huge and up-to-date selection of packages. It gives me a consistent way to run daemons my software depends on, nearly everywhere, including pinning the version and ensuring they all use the same config. It's docker-hub, really, that provides most of the value I get from Docker on a day-to-day basis, and that's the part I'd miss. I know there are other ways to create images and run containers, but I almost never create—or even modify—them myself.

Vagrant also supports running workloads in Docker containers rather than virtual machines (vagrant up --provider docker)

https://www.vagrantup.com/docs/providers/docker/basics

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