[Discuss] systemd sucks and containers suck and language-specific package repos suck

markw at mohawksoft.com markw at mohawksoft.com
Tue Sep 15 08:32:48 EDT 2026


> Kent Borg wrote:
>> And it reinforces my dislike of systemd, and suspicion that Docker is
>> the
>> first thing people throw at any problem making the starting size and
>> complexity always large whether it needs to be or not.
>
>
> VM images as deployment mechanisms are the direct descendant of
> "it works on my laptop... let's put my laptop in the rack".

This is a point I STRONGLY disagree with. A VM is a very powerful tool, it
allows you to run fundamentally different environments on an otherwise
well managed uniform server environment.

People, I think, misunderstand VMs on a conceptual level. Hear me out.
Think about the VM as a packaging vehicle. I can test and deploy whole
environments as a single step. I can shut down VM 1.0, spin up VM 1.1, in
one step. Don't think of a VM as "laptop in a rack" think of it as a self
contained way to deploy whole systems.

With overly file systems, you can have a fully read-only VM image that can
be impervious to attacks.

Just about every service on AWS, Azure, and GCP is a VM. (There are a few
exceptions.)

>
> Containers have the benefit of sometimes being a little smaller,
> but still have the same smell. It's too hard to do it right from
> the beginning for too many people.

Containers are useful, but I have issues with docker's server design as it
introduces its own vulnerabilities. Podman works well enough, I guess.

The idea of containers is kind of a good idea. It started with BSD chroot
jails and grew from there with network name spaces, memory isolation, and
stuff.
>
> -dsr-
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