ish VS Portainer

You can, with ish (https://ish.app). It is a bit slow though and doesn't support the newest releases. (Well and by default it runs Alpine instead of Debian)

On IOS, there is a emulator called ISH which looks great. I haven't tried personally though, I couldn't afford an iphone. I will be using Termux on android for the rest of the post.

I'm a happy daily iSH [1] user, it's an amazing technical project, but I really pine for the day when `apt get blah` will be a reality, using an app available from the official App Store. Be it a paid or free app. CLI only, or with graphics. For concreteness, let's say a Debian-based distro in your iPhone upon tapping Get on Apple's App Store, independently of your location. It is pretty sad that, if this ever comes to be, it will probably be the result of EU/DOJ forces, not of technological advancements.

When do you see this happening (options are number of years)?

[1] https://ish.app/

You can run iSH on the device for Linux (somewhat limited)

https://github.com/ish-app/ish

If you're curious, iSH's source is public: https://github.com/ish-app/ish

You're correct that there is no Linux kernel emulation. They went with reimplementation for that. However, the userland is very much emulated x86 binaries. You can even compile your own C code inside iSH and run it. When you syscall, control passes from the threaded code[0] interpreter into the Linux reimplementation.

The reason why they aren't shipping Debian is that the threaded code technique being used as a JIT substitute in both iSH and UTM SE is far too slow to run a full Debian derivative. Believe me, I tried installing Ubuntu on UTM SE and it took literal hours and flattened my iPad battery in the process. iSH uses Alpine Linux because it's very lightweight[1].

As far as I'm aware there's no secret deal with Apple to lock iSH down. The only limitations I've ran into have to do with MySQL, which wants unaligned atomics, which you can't do on ARM64 without compromising the performance of the emulator. I actually had a discussion with the developer of iSH about this and put in a PR to make MySQL stop crashing iSH.

[0] return-oriented programming

[1] So lightweight it doesn't even ship anything GNU, making it one of the few genuine "Linux distros" with no slash or plus or "I would just like to interject"

> in software side of Ipad IOS, that is the biggest innovation in years

That would be iSH, slow but functional Alpine Linux emulation for iOS.

https://ish.app

> Just imagine how much more versatile the iPad Pro would be if only you could run Linux VMs on it

After installing https://ish.app for Alpine Linux emulation on iPad, one immediately comes up with use cases, even though it's excruciatingly slow.

Hopefully Apple opens up the imminent M3 iPad Pros to run macOS and Linux VMs.

Since I'm not using Kubernetes/K3S to manage the orchestration, I simply use Docker Compose files, which I manage in folders and track with Git. Secrets and credentials are stored securely using .env files — nothing is hardcoded. For maintenance, I use Portainer. The whole Docker management and Ubuntu itself run on the internal SSD for the fastest speed possible, ensuring no other services interfere.

Portainer

Portainer container management UI

I've been a self-hoster for a while. The adventure started with regular mani-pc manufactured by HP. 32G of RAM, Intel gen 10, and 1T HDD drive. However, as long as it was a great experience at the beginning, with time it became a challenge. My stack was built with portainer and a bunch of docker-compose files. It leads to specific issues: with portainer, you don't own the Compose files, they are living inside your tool, but nowhere on the filesystem or git repo.

As an open-source tool, Portainer makes it easier to deploy, monitor, and secure systems using Docker, Kubernetes, Swarm, and Podman. Everyone can use it, from small companies to big enterprises, by offering user-friendly interface automation, and developer self-service.

I'm running this setup on a mini pc running Intel N100(4core, 6w TDP) with 16G ram using portainer to setup the relevant containers. You can directly do this via docker as well.

We see that both of our containers are working and no restarting issues. So all looks good at first glance. Now we can move to the next step. We could now deploy NTFY container, but I would like to deploy a Portainer. Why?

It's crucial to have an effective access management system that allows you to robustly manage user identities and permissions across your clusters. Although Kubernetes includes an advanced RBAC implementation, this only works within a single cluster. A dedicated Kubernetes management platform such as Rancher or Portainer is required to cohesively configure identities and grant users the multi-cluster access they require.

Check it out https://www.portainer.io/

Portainer is a container management platform that provides a powerful web interface to administer your workloads. It natively supports Kubernetes environments to help you manage your Pods, Deployments, Helm charts, and other cluster resources. Portainer also provides robust RBAC capabilities and an external authentication layer, letting you grant team members access to Kubernetes through Portainer without directly exposing your cluster.