[quadrifoliate]

I'm quoting their copy here to make sure my criticism is accurate:

> Ubuntu VMs on demand for any workstation

What does this get me over VirtualBox?

> Get an instant Ubuntu VM with a single command.

Vagrant? Maybe the "single command" is good? Am I just being too much of a mounting-it-locally-with-curlftpfs guy?

> Multipass can launch and run virtual machines and configure them with cloud-init like a public cloud.

I am already confused. Are these VMs on a public cloud or not? If they are on my local machine, it's not really a test of the cloud (hint: Testing problems with virtual machines is not the difficult part of simulating a cloud on your computer, testing the possible failures with the other 200- hosted message queues and databases is). Again, what is this getting me over Vagrant or Virtualbox?

> Prototype your cloud launches locally for free.

I am still at a loss to understand what exactly is the selling point of this tool. Is it literally just "vagrant, but for Ubuntu"? I really don't get it.

[blacksmith_tb]

It may be popping up in the news again because Canonical just announced M1 support for multipass on macOS[1]. I haven't tried it, but I do appreciate the reference to The Fifth Element.

1: https://ubuntu.com/blog/canonical-transforms-linux-on-mac

[3ds]

That‘s why and how I found it.

[capableweb]

The docs seems to explain things the best, as usual:

https://multipass.run/docs

> Multipass is a mini-cloud on your workstation using native hypervisors of all the supported plaforms (Windows, macOS and Linux),

Seems their innovation is "Docker, but after 8 years of Docker"

[vizzah]

What about Canonical's LXD/LXC?

[easton]

It seems faster than Vagrant to me, and doesn't rely on VirtualBox (it uses Hyper-V on Windows, KVM on Linux, and Apple's Hypervisor API on macOS). Granted, Vagrant doesn't either, but very few of the boxes have support for the native hypervisors.

[lenn0x]

Yes it's been way faster for me over Virtualbox. It's how I run docker now from macOS. I've been testing out the M1 support for few months now.

[zokier]

> Is it literally just "vagrant, but for Ubuntu"?

Yes. It doesn't seem very confusing to me?

[hluska]

I might be wrong about this - I have a history of sometimes not always understanding technology before I discard it. However, I briefly used Multipass but switched back to Vagrant. To me, it was a new tech that did the same as the old tech only with the usual new tech adoption muck ups.

However, I might be wrong. Maybe I just missed the point of it?

[Tajnymag]

Cloud-Init is a local tool for setting up a new fresh system instance. It isn't tied to any real cloud.

[maccard]

I'm with you - this seems like docker for ubuntu.

[lenn0x]

that's how ive been running it on macOS. I put up a guide https://github.com/chrisgoffinet/docker-multipass