So I am not a professional programmer, but I do like to tinker with projects and just teach myself stuff (in python and now rust). I currently just install stuff on my linux distro off of the repos or anaconda for python. I’ve never had any particular issue or anything. I was thinking about maybe moving projects into a container just so that they are more cleanly separated from my base install. I am mostly wondering about how the community uses containers and when they are most appropriate and when they are more issue than they are worth. I think it will be good for learning, but want to hear from people who do it for a living.
I love containers for this use case.
They allow you to just install and test pretty much anything you want and if it doesn’t go well… just rebuild the container and start again. Rebuilding a container takes about 5 seconds to fix problems that would take 5 weeks of headaches if you made the same mistake on your main operating system.
If
apt-get installwants to install a bunch of dependencies you’re not sure about, oh well give it a try and see how it goes. That’s definitely not an approach you can use successfully outside of a container.Another benefit of containers is you can have two computers (e.g. a desktop and a laptop) and easily share the exact same container between both of them.
Personally I use Docker, because there are rich tools available for it and also it’s what everyone else I work with uses. I can’t speak to wether or not Incus is better as I’ve never used it.