[magicalhippo]

For me as a mere user, wanting to run some homelab services, the main advantages to containers are that they make updates easier (don't need to wait for distro), and it makes it much clearer where configuration and data lives, easing backup and rollback by orders of magnitude.

Static vs dynamic linking is an implementation detail as far as I'm concerned. If all the dynamic libs needed were in a well-defined location it wouldn't matter that much.

[forgotmyinfo]

The benefit of waiting for maintainers to update your software is that you have a stronger guarantee that it won't break your system, or otherwise fubar something. Maintainers are the adults in the room saying "no, fix your shit" when sloppy developers release crap, which seems to be happening more and more frequently lately.

As for where configuration and data live, that's always available in the docs, and Linux convention puts stuff in /etc, so I'm not sure how containers help. And dynamic libraries are in a well-defined location, with environment variables and other tools that allow you to specify where they live. It's not like dynamic linking is an unsolved problem.

[EraYaN]

Maintainers are also the ones breaking software so, realistically the difference is basically moot. And for a containers to fubar the system you have to really mess up. At worst that specific container fubars itself and you rollback a tag.

There are just fewer things that can go wrong when you get to a sufficient number of services. And lastly moving to a new host is infinitely easier too, export the volume, import of new host and off you go. And stuff like Kubernetes will just handle this for you (and more).

And as for those linux conventions, they vary a lot from distro to distro, you can never be quite sure where that specific version of that specific distro puts its files. So having them just not be able to touch the host ever is a good thing.

[c-hendricks]

Right, but a piece of software having a distribution maintainer doesn't mean it will never have bugs, and if it's a container there's already much less risk of it breaking my system.

As for your second paragraph, that's very idealistic. Config can live in /var, /usr, /home, /usr/local, literally anywhere. I find it much nicer when all data / configuration for a piece of software is all self contained.

[silverquiet]

I think of myself as a mere user as well, though I manage the container system/orchestration for a small SaaS company as well (we're weirdos who use Swarm instead of Kubernetes) and agree with you regarding the management benefits.