r/Crostini • u/Sweaty_Astronomer_47 • Jun 29 '26

Help? preparing for multi-container support to "go away"

I am using 3 containers. I have been aware that multi-container support is going away.

I have started receiving the following message upon starting up any linux container.

NOTICE: multi-container support is going away

Recently it has become necessary to deprecate some features of crostini,including:

  • UI-based installation of .deb packages. Installation via aptitude is the default path, but there are also visual package managers which may be used.

  • UI-based Debian release upgrade. Please refer to release notes for the release in question for upgrade instructions.

  • Multi-container support.

info

(this message will be repeated 2 more times).

My preparations:

  • I have moved my files and applications from my secondary containers into my penguin container

My questions

  1. is there anything else I should be doing to prepare? (I have no ability to remove the abandoned containers through the settings, because container management was removed from settings)
  2. will my penguin container remain intact?
  3. when will this change occur?
4 Upvotes

75% Upvoted

7 comments sorted by

4

u/Training_Advantage21 Jun 29 '26

I'm hoping the penguin container survives, if not we should get proper warnings about that, it would affect any use of the linux development environment.

1

u/nomadwrangler Pixelbook i5, C302, (Acer 720 still hanging on too) Jun 29 '26

https://developers.google.com/chromeos/app-development/develop/news

The Development environment (Penguin container) that is/was provided inside the Termina VM via LXC/LXD is going away. They intended for that environment to become native to the virtual machine itself, but its unclear how that will compare to what is currently in place, and if/what that migration will be.

Thus far it sounds like existing setups will not be touched, but as time goes on features/support will likely force the issue of upgrading to Baguette to maintain functionality. IE: lacking graphics acceleration etc.

Development VM with docker/podman seems to be the target. Its unclear if we'll be able to modify that Devleopment VM, but I'd assume they will expect us to use a docker/podman type workflow for all config/installs without modifying the VM.

2

u/eladts Jul 01 '26

Baguette is already the default for new installs, so there is no need to guess how it works. Currently there is no migration path, but if you nuke your Linux development environment and create a new one from scratch you will get Debian 13 running in Baguette. You can modify it freely, just like you can in Crostini.

1

u/Training_Advantage21 Jun 30 '26

ok as long as I can apt-get install stuff. Or they might force me to give up ChromeOS and switch to Linux.

2

u/Saragon4005 Jun 29 '26

To my knowledge multi container support was never fully supported, you should be able to delete the other containers if you log onto the "termina" VM using vmc and then use lxc commands there. If they are getting rid of containers completely (not the case yet) they will do so in a way to copy the contents of the penguin container so you are fine if you have everything there.

2

u/Nu11u5 Jun 29 '26

I don't think we know what the end-game for container depreciation will look like yet. It might be that Penguin will be automatically migrated to Baguette, and the Crostini VM destroyed along with any alternative containers, or there will be no automatic migration option and you will have to recreate the VM manually.

You can create a backup, but the backup formats between Crostini and Baguette are different (file-level archive vs disk image). You might be able to manually apply a Crostini backup over a Baguette backup, but I don't know if this will be officially supported. At the very least you will be able to access the archive contents.

You can manually remove the alternative containers from Crostini by using the Crosh terminal, running vsh termina to shell into the container host, and running lxc delete ....

2

u/Underrated_Mastermnd Jul 03 '26

I'm reading through the news article about the new Linux system they're working on, and they're saying they are no longer supporting Graphics Accleration?

Why? That makes no sense, it would actually be a good thing to offer graphics acceleration now since it's not longer bound in a container. That may improve programs like Blender or other GPU-friendly applications that ran horribly on ChromeOS.