ostree VS podman

Ansible makes mutable changes to the OS, task by task.

Nix is immutable. A new change is made entirely new, and only after the build is successful, all packages are "symlinked" to the current system.

Fedora Silverblue is based on ostree [1]. It works similarly like git, but on your root tree. But it requires you to reboot the whole system for the changes to take effect. Since Nix is just symlinked packages, you don't need to reboot the system.

More detailed explanation here [2].

[1]: https://github.com/ostreedev/ostree

[2]: https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2023-07-12-intro-to-immutable-...

This one is for the ostree bug currently ongoing: https://github.com/ostreedev/ostree/issues/2900

This sounds related to the ostree bug.

I definitely agree that immutability offers considerable value in regards to improving security. But arguably it's insufficient to pull the win over mutable Fedora due to the losses caused by the inability to install the kernel-hardened package and the lack of UKI (Unified Kernel Image) support.

Other hardening guides mention a Unified Kernel Image as another measure to further improve security. Unfortunately, once more, this is (currently) not supported on Fedora Silverblue. I haven't seen it being done on openSUSE Aeon either. Though, once again, I'd love to be corrected!

The fedora crew is working on it through ostree though, so both fedora Silverblue and flatpak will be getting it (as well as true immutability) in the future: https://github.com/ostreedev/ostree/issues/2867

Aside from what has already been mentioned, Unified Kernel Image isn't supported (yet).

A lot of well-known Docker alternatives emerged at this point, the most commonly recommended of which must be Podman (along with Podman Desktop). This is what I use on my Windows machines, and this was the first solution that I tried on the Macbook as well.

Example of why: https://github.com/containers/podman/issues/5102#issuecommen...

Podman

Even though we will focus on Docker for this article, I wanted to mention that there are more container creation and management tools such as Podman, Rkt, and so on.

By using containerization, the application will always have the same configuration that is used in the development environment and production environment. There is no more "It works on my machine". Some examples of containerization technologies are Docker and Podman.

Podman Documentation. Podman is a daemonless container engine for developing, managing, and running OCI Containers on your Linux System.

AFAIK podman either already supports pods in quadlet container files, or will in the near future. https://github.com/containers/podman/pull/20762

Podman as a devcontainers engine doesn't currently work if you use devcontainer features [1] or (and this sounds like you're issue) if you use WSL2.

I haven't submitted the WSL2 issue to the Podman team yet. If you get to it before I do, can you like it here?

https://github.com/containers/podman/issues/18691#issuecomme...

You can also use their Oracle Linux Docker images with the database preinstalled using either Podman or Docker. Just make absolutely sure you are downloading something you are licensed to use, because it seems really easy to accidentally infringe copyright via this method.