alt Hacker NewsWhat I hate about docker and other such solutions is that I cannot install it as nonroot user, and that it keeps images between users in a database. I want to move things around using mv and cp, and not have another management layer that I need to be aware of and that can end up in an inconsistent state.
Replies
> I cannot install it as nonroot user
Sure you cannot install docker or podman as a non-root user. But take your argument a bit further: what if the kernel is compiled without cgroups support? Then you will need root to replace the kernel and reboot. The root user can do arbitrarily many things to prevent you from installing any number of software. The root user can prevent you from using arbitrary already installed software. The root user can even prevent you from logging in.
It is astounding to me that someone would complain that a non-root user cannot install software. A much more reasonable complaint is that a non-root user can become root while using docker. This complaint has been resolved by podman.
If you're not into rootless Docker, but still want to improve sandboxing capabilities, consider alternative runtimes such as runsc (also known as gVisor)
> What I hate about docker and other such solutions is that I cannot install it as nonroot user
There's a rootless [0] option, but that does require some sysadmin setup on the host to make it possible. That's a Linux kernel limitation on all container tooling, not a limitation of Docker.
> and that it keeps images between users in a database.
Not a traditional database, but content addressable filesystem layers, commonly mounted as an overlay filesystem. Each of those layers are read-only and reusable between multiple images, allowing faster updates (when only a few layers change), and conserving disk space (when multiple images share a common base image).
> I want to move things around using mv and cp, and not have another management layer that I need to be aware of and that can end up in an inconsistent state.
You can mount volumes from the host into a container, though this is often an anti-pattern. What you don't want to do is modify the image layers directly, since they are shared between images. That introduces a lot of security issues.
[0]: https://docs.docker.com/engine/security/rootless/