>What if I need cron in my docker container? And ssh? And a text editor? And a monitoring agent? :P
How are you going to orchestrate all those daemons without systemd? :P
As you mentioned, a container running systemd and a suite of background services is the typical use case of LXD, not docker. But the difference seems to be cultural -- there's nothing preventing one from using systemd as the entry point of a docker container.
Even putting GUI apps in a container isnt too bad once one develops the right incantation for x11/wayland forwarding.
My experience is if the tooling is set up right it’s not painful, it’s the fiddling around with volume mounts folder permissions and debug points and “what’s inside the container and what isn’t” etc that is always the big pain point
Very accurate - that was one of the steps that caused me to fiddle quite a bit. Had to add an entrypoint to chown the mounts and also some Buildkit cache volumes for all the package managers.
You can skip the uid/chown stuff if you work with userns mappings, but this was my work machine so I didn't want to globally touch the docker daemon.
fwiw I recently bootstrapped a small Debian image for myself, originally intended to sandbox coding agents I was evaluating. Shortly after I got annoyed by baseline vim and added my tmux & nvim dotfiles, now I find myself working inside the container regularly. It definitely works and is actually not the worst experience if your workflow is cli-focused.