There are quite a few Linux distributions with native packages in their main repository, that includes ArchLinux, Alpine, Gentoo and OpenSUSE for those that I'm aware of with active package maintainers. There also are packages for Fedora/CentOS/RHEL through maintained COPR repositories and I'm sure I'm forgetting some distros.

Go can be a bit annoying to package in general and LXD was made a bit harder by also having a stack of C libraries for some bits, though with 4.6 we kicked out the need for a custom sqlite and for a coroutine library, so on the C side, outside of the C library, it's down to liblxc, libraft and libdqlite making it a bit easier to package.

For distributions that have a policy of splitting every single Go package into their own source packages (as is the case with Debian), our recommendation is to stick to the LTS release of LXD which only gets released every 2 years and where the bugfix releases don't normally alter dependencies.

The normal feature releases come out every month and those just aren't a good fit when it may take you more than a month to get any new dependency packaged independently first...

Anyway, as an upstream, we are very happy to work with packagers to get native packages in as many distribution as possible.

We do maintain the snap package ourselves and certainly do enjoy it as an upstream since it gives us very large distribution and release coverage with a single package.

Most common criticism of the snap package can be addressed with one of the mechanisms we outlined here: https://discuss.linuxcontainers.org/t/managing-the-lxd-snap/...

That being said, at the end of the day, all we care about is that our users get to run an up to date, secure, LXD. How they get is doesn't really matter to us as an upstream :)

And it's maybe interesting to point out that the majority of our userbase these days are on Chromebooks, effectively using the Gentoo ebuild package of LXD!