• Hit the ground running deploying…pretty much anything.

    Was running game servers on my Windows PC through Docker and they were super easy to set up. I got a new PC and decided to repurpose my old computer into an Ubuntu server to get some experience with Unix. I have only been more frustrated once in my entire life. Sure, once things are set up on Linux they are really powerful, but the barrier to entry is so absurdly high and running anything “out of the box” is literally impossible by design.

    • I feel your pain, ugh. Setting up certain types of software can be a pain in the ass because there’s almost always dependencies that need to be set up first; in addition, it’s not always clear what you’re supposed to install or how to do it the right way. A lot of Linux-related documentation out there isn’t geared towards beginners and leaves out a lot of important explanatory and contextual information, which just makes it more frustrating. Unnecessarily, in my opinion.

      However, I gotta mention that Ubuntu - though widely used - is sorta notorious for being user unfriendly and isn’t always the most appropriate choice for a beginner Linux user. If anyone reading this is thinking about trying Linux for the first time, I would consider Linux Mint. It’s a Linux distro that is actually based on Ubuntu (which is based on Debian), but it works “out of the box” better than most and should be a positive experience for most users. It’s pretty solid.

      • Don’t get me wrong - I know that they are, and I know that Linux is superior for running docker containers. The thing is that Windows handles all the permissions for you. An average Joe can get a docker container up and running on Windows. You need significantly more Linux-specific knowledge to get a container running on Linux, and the advice given by the community is often cryptic for beginners.

        • Then try podman! The podman desktop application by redhat is probably one of the nicest interfaces for container orchestration i’ve seen in a while, if not a little bare. Podman is rootless by design and there’s basically no configuration needed (for non-commercial purposes, anyway) besides loading up the gui, downloading your images, and spinning up whatever software you need.

    • The person is correct in this isn’t a Linux problem, but relates to your experience.

      Windows worked by giving everyone full permissions and opening every port. While Microsoft has tried to roll that back the administration effort goes into restricting access.

      Linux works on the opposite principle, you have to learn how to grant access to users and expose ports.

      You would have to learn this mental switch no matter what Linux task your trying to learn

      Dockers guide to setting up a headless docker is copy/paste. You can install Docker Desktop on Linux and the effort is identical to windows. The only missing step is

      sudo usermod -aG docker $user

      To ensure your user can access the docker host as a local user.