Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by d3Xt3r 475 days ago
I see that they compare themselves against other distros like Alpine and Arch, but the big difference is that you can actually install all those other distros on physical hardware - can you do that with stagex? I don't see any mentions of setting up a bootloader, initramfs, init, display manager etc.

It's fine if it can't be installed on physical hardware (or if that isn't the intended use), but in which case, I think this point should be clarified.

To elaborate my use case, I'm interested in using minimal OCI containers as a bootable OS, so when I do an update, I can switch over to the new image (or a different image) in an atomic operation. Yes, I know there are projects like Fedora Atomic, uBlue, bootc etc, but they're all far too bloated - I want to use a minimal, musl-based, fully reproducible image-based updates.
1 comments
lrvick 475 days ago
Stagex is a build distribution first, but that said we are working on "sxctl" to make it easier for people to extract packages from containers and put them in your local prefix similar to nix.

Stagex can also easily generate immutable/deterministic live isos, full bootable server images, enclave os images, etc.

It was these sorts of use cases that made us realize no existing distro hit our threat model and caused us to build stagex in the first place.

Here are some standalone deterministic linux distros built or bootstrapped with stagex:

- https://codeberg.org/stagex/repros - Server distro designed exclusively for reproducible builds

- https://git.distrust.co/public/airgap - Minimal CLI-only workstation distribution designed for offline key/secret management

- https://git.distrust.co/public/enclaveos - Linux kernel, rust init system, and user supplied rust code for running whatever you want in nitro enclaves

- https://github.com/tkhq/quorumos - Linux/rust based enclave operating system that uses remote attestation and shamirs secret sharing to manage applications no single sysadmin can be trusted with access to.

- https://github.com/siderolabs/toolchain/blob/main/Pkgfile#L5... - Talos Linux by sidero labs just recently moved their toolchain from alpine to stagex for much higher supply chain security

Honestly stagex was built for your use case.

link