[apitman]

What is the current state of the "container Linux" ecosystem? It seemed like it was all the rage for a few years then sort of lost steam. Seems like a really good idea as a only moderately heavy container user.

[robszumski]

Yes, it's a very good idea. I don't think it's lost steam, it's just buried underneath other layers of the stack.

Red Hat has Fedora CoreOS and RHEL CoreOS variants. Flatcar is going strong with the CoreOS-ethos intact. Talos Linux is also pretty popular.

The cloud providers have various minimal OSes for use underneath Kubernetes clusters but not used for standalone machines. I think Rancher OS is no more but the rest of Rancher is ongoing. VMware's various minimal OS efforts are no more.

[mdaniel]

Don't overlook Bottlerocket, which despite coming out of AWS is not (AFAIK) AWS-centric: https://github.com/bottlerocket-os/bottlerocket#readme

It's also super handy for writing out static Pod manifests to have replace the brain-damaging Ignition as a less stupid alternative to cloud-init

[robszumski]

I love the standalone kubelet/static manifests pattern. It's ideal for edge type stuff and really simple systems. Here's a talk on my CNC control software running in my shop with just the kubelet, no control plane: https://developers.redhat.com/devnation/tech-talks/kubelet-n...

[apitman]

Cool thanks for the information