you can theoretically run a virtual machine like libriscv5 which doesn't require root. or qemu doesn't require root as well. But qemu is blocked for my usecase. There is flatpak theoretically as well

There is podman but it requires one time root.

qemu is great but it's a VM, not a container.

Linux user namespaces can be used to create containers without having root access, see ex. https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/66084/simulate-chro...

There's also https://github.com/termux/proot-distro which may or may not count as containers depending on how you define the word but I think it does count

you can't detach your username from a process, nor the network ns... etc, etc, etc.

yeah you can do some smaller fakechroot and maybe some bind mounts... if you call that a "container" good for you.

> you can't detach your username from a process, nor the network ns... etc, etc, etc.

Sure looks like it works?

  $ unshare -i -n -p -u -T -r -f
  # ls
  # id
  gid=0(root) groups=0(root),65534(nogroup)
  # ip -br a
  lo               DOWN

> yeah you can do some smaller fakechroot and maybe some bind mounts... if you call that a "container" good for you.

Why are you being condescending about what constitutes a container?