Personally I prefer non-Debian distributions, but for LXD a lot of the ones I tried(Alpine, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, RHEL, Fedora) required extra work to get LXD going. Are there any non-Debian distro’s that are (close to) plug and play with LXD?
I’d think Arch wouldn’t be hard to use with LXD, but I need to have a server distro as host OS.
The LXD snap works well on a lot of distros and we even run automatic testing for it:
https://jenkins.linuxcontainers.org/job/lxd-test-snap-latest-stable/
Native packages from distros other than Ubuntu may be a bit more hit and miss and the LXD team doesn’t run any tests on those. So my recommendation would be Ubuntu with the debs or any of the distros above using the LXD snap. That way you’ll be using something that we actively test and have working test machines to reproduce and fix any issue.
Of all of those above, the only one which doesn’t work on a stock distro is ArchLinux as it requires the linux-userns kernel be manually built and installed before LXD will work properly. All the others are just using a clean install of the server distro, snapd installed and then snap install lxd…
Thank you for your reply,
I do wanted to show you this: snapd
Looking at that github page shows there’s currently no ‘stable’ more-then-long-supported distro supported by snapd.
I understand that this is because snapd is very new and thus may require new techniques, but I believe you’ll also understand me if I say I want my servers to be able to run for ~5 years without me having to reconfigure/replace them.
But for now I’m thinking about testing Fedora with the LXD snap because that fits the best within my server environment because I do really love the work everyone from LXD has done to improve LXC.
Again, thank you for your help,
Altlock
I don’t think that list on the snapd wiki is particularly up to date.
Of the distributions we’re testing the LXD snap on, at least Debian Stretch and OpenSUSE 42.2/42.3 are stable distributions with pretty long term support (Debian does LTS on some releases for up to 5 years, not sure for OpenSUSE).
The RedHat based distros aren’t doing so well as snapd doesn’t work on Centos/RHEL/Oracle at this point. Fedora does have a working snapd, but it also doesn’t have any kind of long term support.