The last post on the subject I could find was a year ago. So thought I would ask again. I have debian 12 up on miniPC and I have my NAS mounted. My intention is to use jellyfin and some of the arr* stuff. I know only a little about systemd (I just google what I need to know). I have some contianer knowledge, but mostly in k8s. And the docker parts aren't really my problem. But I have a vague understanding of docker. What are the latest pros and cons of containers vs service installation?

Edit: The opinions were unanimous. Containers it is.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

There are different ways to run container. I run them via podman-systemd services. For me, the main benefits of running a container over an executable on the host system are the following:

not everything I want to self-host is packaged for my distro, but they all have container images available
operating system updates are independent from application updates, application updates are independent from each other. One broken dependency won't kill my entire stack
all containers are running without root privileges and with restricted access to the host system. One vulnerable application won't give access to my entire system
I can have all my config in one directory (~/.config/containers/systemd/), instead of having them across multiple /etc/* directories
volume bind mounts make it easy to declaratively mount any folder anywhere, so I can keep my directory structure how I like it
cockpit offers a great UI to visualize my hosted applications