Question for the Mr. Stephane + dev team

Greetings

At present LXD is very tightly tied to snapd which means that the predominant usage is designed for Ubuntu.

What would need to be changed to make LXD a stand-alone application (like postgresql say)?

Is there any possibility of such a change happening?

TIA

Hello,

I wouldn’t say that “LXD is very tightly tied to snapd”. In fact, it’s technically not tight to it at all, meaning that you can use LXD without snapd with no problem. Some distributions ship packages of LXD that don’t require snapd.

If you want, you can compile LXD from source and deploy it however you want (for example using a systemd unit).

All that being said, if you are talking about using LXD on Ubuntu, the only deployment mode that the LXD team supports right now is with snapd. You can of course create a personal PPA with non-official LXD packages, if you want.

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Right, we do favor distributing and installing LXD as a snap because it’s much easier for us as the upstream to update and test on all platforms we care about.

Ironically enough, this is mostly because it gives us access to a lot of non-Ubuntu systems for free. If we were only caring about Ubuntu, we’d probably have stuck with a deb package much longer.

It’s also worth noting that almost 40% of LXD installs aren’t on Ubuntu these days but on a Gentoo-based distribution (ChromeOS) so while we do work for Canonical and certainly do our development and testing on Ubuntu (though we have CI on all distros supporting the snap), LXD does work very well on other Linux distributions and isn’t particularly hard to install, either manually or by using the snap on your distribution of choice.

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Are you interested in providing yourself a stand-alone packaging of LXD?
In general, that should be quite doable.

Projects like Debian take a lot of time because they have to (by their policy) break down the application into all the separate individual packages, LXD - Debian Wiki

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