Finally, Quadlets - Ouch!

I’ve been hankering to move to quadlets in the hope of simplifying my admin burden. After a wasted Sunday evening, I think the verdict is:

• I like this; it’s a win for simplicity.
• Why no one has put forth userctl as an alias for systemctl --user is beyond me.

ManPage Arch Linux

It’s far easier to template quadlet generation versus podman-compose. It’s easier to survive reboots (the catalyst for the conversion was an upgrade to Ubuntu LTS 26).

What was non-trivial

1. It took a long while for me to get my head around environment variables, how they fit, and the relationship to instance variables.
2. I lost some time on container structure cleanup (podman network access is still a PITA)
3. podlet is really not worth your time. I wasted more time conforming to the conversion tool than just learning the syntax. Sorry podlet.

What remains

1. How do I store these (or some protofile) in source control
2. One weird issue with an environment variable not being passed on container startup

In the end, I think for my goal of having six or seven agents all using the same base configuration with instance config - I have a winner. Longer term, all that’s left is to find a remote command and control mechanism for viewing logs and I’m starting and stopping these systemd units. And I’ll be in heaven. Until then, I’ll be farming this out to my agents.