I am trying to familiarize myself with Linux/containers. I have installed Linux and did some tutorials to learn the OS. I just created my first container and I am curious if there were practical applications I could install and use? Please share any thoughts, I appreciate your responses. Thank you
Hi Brad,
I have written a set of tutorials on practical tasks with LXD containers.
If you are a desktop Linux user, you can install programs in an LXD container instead of installing on your desktop. Because it gets messy when you install all sort of dependencies.
This is relevant with Wine (windows emulator), Steam, and many others.
If you want to compile a big program, you can do that in a LXD container. All the dependencies stay in the container. When you remove the container, all are gone. Your host (desktop) is not affected.
If you do work like nodejs or other web services software, you can install in the container. You can also use snapshots to take a snapshot of the state of the container. Then, you can restore back to a specific (working) snapshot, if you need to.
In a nutshell, LXD is similar to virtual machines (VM) like with VMWare and Virtualbox. In contrast, LXD is much lighter than VMWare/Virtualbox. As a rule of thumb, you can run about ten times more LXD containers than virtual machines on the same computer. When you learn more on LXD usage, you can squeeze in even more containers.
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I am using virtual box so I could remake a desktop VM, very helpful response. I did not know know what LXD was… Thank you very much!!