The pattern runs something like this.
Identify a shiny, new, and ferociously complex system that you'd like to know more about.
Bumble your way through the initial install, taking copious notes on things that will have changed by the next time you get around to look at them.
Declare victory after some trivial task beyond the initial install is complete.
This is an anti-pattern in a lot of ways. Perhaps the ferociously complex system can be safely ignored for a week or a year, rather than needing attention now. If it does merit attention, then give it a proper fully automated install rather than a haphazard try. Note that this might take a few uninstall cycles, that would be fine.
As an example, I have Rancher Desktop running on my MacBook Air M1.
It seems to idle just fine, taking up a bunch of memory and a couple
of cores but not getting in the way of actual use of the rest of
the machine. I've installed exactly one application on it (my "sisyphus"
function for OpenFaaS), and even that is less than ideal because
the container it's running in isn't up to date. There's some complexity
in there that I just barely remember about nerdctl.
And yet - and yet - here I go again with the same pattern. Gee, it would be interesting to have a Fedora version running Tailscale SSH on my M1 Mac. I'll bet I can run that under something - "lima" it is.
limactl start --name=fedora template://fedora
Try it out, run into something of course, a fresh issue at
https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/4908
in which Fedora Server at Fedora 36 doesn't want to run Tailscale SSH because of SELinux, but there's a workaround of sorts there. And with the workaround, I can ssh into an arm64 Fedora VM on my M1.
But wait, there's more. Armed with that knowledge, and looking at the limactl templates, I see there's a "riscv64" template that turns up a VM under emulation. A failed install later, notice that the Ubuntu distribution has moved a file, and we're up (and also have Tailscale SSH up again). Notes at
https://github.com/lima-vm/lima/issues/930
Now not just one but two different VMs running, plus a third in which to run Kubernetes. An embarrassment of riches (or perhaps just an embarrassment of idle cycles). Two more diverse systems for my tailnet, and two more chips away at a complex system to understand just a little bit better.
