this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2024
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Ideally, there'd be a simple RPM installer compatible with Alma 9 that I can point to a samba share that holds all the photos, kind of like what I do with Jellyfin. Also nice if it uses an otherwise unused port or I can easily set what port it uses.

My googling is finding a bunch of docker stuff, which always seems needlessly complicated to me vs an RPM... I'm also using a low powered x86 tiny computer to front JellyFin and would like to host this on the same computer vs needing another server.

Any ideas?

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Because it's easier to tell someone "use this docker image" than it is to tell them "go through all of these thousands of steps to get this service working".

The main reason I use containers for my personal things is easy to setup and to migrate, those are huge points, and the added complexity is not that much, in fact I would argue it's less complicated to figure out why a docker image is not running than figure out why a service stopped responding.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Agreed, sure scaling is one factor, but I don't think this person has ever really dived into why containers are slick. Why you aren't tracking down what dependency hell caused your app to crash. Conflicting cuda versions. Two apps using the same port. Trying to decipher a language you've never used before

Whenever I hear "containers are too complex" or "I don't like containers" I read it as "I don't understand containers". There are some real flaws to them, but no self respecting ops engineer would ever say "containers have no value beyond scaling"

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

This is a false dichotomy. Just because containers make it easy to ship software, doesn't mean other means can't be equally easy.

NixOS achieves a greater ease of deployment than docker-compose and the like without any containers involved for instance.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

NixOS packages only work with NixOS system. They're harder to setup than just copying a docker-compose file over and they do use container technology. If the idea is to remove complexity from the setup, NixOS goes in the opposite direction.

Also without containers you don't solve the biggest problems such as incompatible database versions between multiple services.

I stand by what I said, I can give a 2 step tutorial on setting up any docker system (copy this compose file, run up on it), anything simpler than that wouldn't be as robust in terms of configurations.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 months ago

NixOS packages only work with NixOS system. They’re harder to setup than just copying a docker-compose file over and they do use container technology.

It's interesting how none of that is true.

Nixpkgs work on practically any Linux kernel.

Whether NixOS modules are easier to set up and maintain than unsustainably copying docker-compose files is subjective.

Neither Nixpkgs nor NixOS use container technology for their core functionality.
NixOS has the nixos-container framework to optionally run NixOS inside of containerised environments (systemd-nspawn) but that's rather niche actually. Nixpkgs does make use of bubblewrap for a small set of stubborn packages but it's also not at all core to how it works.

Totally beside the point though; even if you don't think NixOS is simpler, that still doesn't mean containers are the only possible mean by which you could possibly achieve "easy" deployments.

Also without containers you don’t solve the biggest problems such as incompatible database versions between multiple services.

Ah, so you have indeed not even done the bare minimum of research into what Nix/NixOS are before you dismissed it. Nice going there.

as robust in terms of configurations

Docker compose is about the opposite of a robust configuration system.