Design flaws/bugs in subuser

  • Application startup time is slowed. On my system with Docker’s aufs backend it takes 2.5 seconds extra time for all applications, be it vim or iceweasel. I have read reports that on newer systems with SSDs and btrfs this can be reduced to a quarter of a second.

  • Certain things involving sharing of data between applications, like the clipboard in vim, just won’t work.

  • DBUS/gsettings don’t work between subusers.

  • Inheriting the $PWD is a generally shitty idea. If I run vim in my home dir, it can see and edit all of my files. The only security advantage is if I run vim in some subdirectory.

  • I hope this will be fixed by something more sophisticated like giving access only to paths specified in the command line arguments.

  • Disk usage is several times greater when installing one container per application due to the reduced ability to share dependencies

  • Docker will soon have ZFS support, which has limited support for block deduplication. Maybe future versions of Docker will have a venti based storage driver thus solving the problem perfectly and elegantly and also making updates even faster than on a traditional system.