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.
I recently moved from a docker-compose setup with portainer as a manager to podman+quadlets+cockpit . After the initial pain of migration i'm really happy! I can also manage VMs, volumes, and check systemd logs so it's a good all-in-one solution for managing standalone servers. Also i think it uses systemd activation so it's really light on resources. For someone who dislikes the proxmox approach of custom kernel/os this is a good alternative.
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.
- Easy OIDC
- Generally improve the file manager addon
- ncdu-like addon
- interface to create simple systemd services
- more visibility into which commands you can run to do the same thing
A `cockpit doctor` style command that extra plugins like cockpit machines can extend.
I've found that Cockpit Machines is really unreliable on Debian and it's nothing really to do with Cockpit - it's things like dbus settings that break Cockpit.
eg, having to add this to make it reliable on my Debian Trixie install:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE busconfig PUBLIC "-//freedesktop//DTD D-BUS Bus Configuration 1.0//EN" "http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/dbus/1.0/busconfig.dtd">
<busconfig>
<limit name="max_match_rules_per_connection">4096</limit>
</busconfig>
It would be fantastic if Cockpit could spot known issues like this and warn the user/administrator.
I would love to resize drives/partitions on Linux machines without it feeling like open heart surgery, in a place I already have handy for generally poking around those machines.
from a company (RHEL users) POV: EntraID support -- we're using https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/entra/identity/devices/how... for SSH at the moment (not really happy with it but I don't have a better alternate) -- and that does not work for cockpit. So another way to authenticate against entra would be nice for corporate users
Some more love for the updates page. E.g. select a subset of updates to install, be more clear that the last update time could be different if you installed updates via CLI, that kind of thing.
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.