bookwar

My own early sysadmin experience was with Ubuntu eBox and I hated it. Because none of the expected configuration files or commands you would find on Stackoverflow would work on a eBox managed server. You would do configuration through the UI or nothing.

The debugging was also impossible, because logs were not in the expected places and standard grep on log and conf files would give you nothing.

Cockpit is way better than that. Partially because of systemd, but also dbus and other relatively new APIs in the Linux plumbing layer, which finally allowed us to implement consistent and stateless management UI of a system.

We do have a cockpit-podman plugin and have added recently some features to simplify management of podman quadlets. (podman quadlets is like a systemd-friendly version of docker compose, which is a good fit for a single server use case)

So if you get onboard with podman, you may get some benefits from the Cockpit UI for it.

But you are right, there are many different container technologies and we haven't catched up with all of them.

The main difference of Cockpit as opposed to more old school visual server administration tools that it doesn't replace standard server management approaches with its own configuration storage in some weird database.

Edits which you make through cockpit and edits which you make through cli are exactly the same edits in same APIs. You do not need to choose one or the over. You can switch from one to the other seamlessly on a command by command basis.

Question from a Cockpit PO: if you were to choose one feature to add to the project what that feature would be?