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Comment by numbsafari | Hacker News Reader

Super disappointed in this part of it. Is anyone else aware/familiar with a decent immutable lightweight Linux distro like Container Linux?

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If you're looking for immutability, I can recommend NixOS. However what is drawing me to container Linux is mainly its update process

The draw of CoreOS Linux for me is its curated pairing of the Linux kernel, Docker, and etcd. There was a commercial entity reviewing upstream changelogs and making sure that they were pairing components appropriately. I wonder if an non-commercial district can really get this right.

Take a look at Linuxkit by Docker: https://github.com/linuxkit/linuxkit . I didn't develop it, but I use it indirectly via Docker for Mac, which I use a lot. The latest version supports Kubernetes. This means Docker commercially maintains a Linux/Docker/Kubernetes stack that needs to run reliably on what I think is a very large install base. They have open-sourced the system they use for this, it's called Linuxkit and it's a very cool, underrated project.

+1 too :-)

I'm using NixOS happily since 2014 after getting messed up in pacman dependencies on Arch and haven't looked back. But their too radical shift from LSB makes for a less attractive enterprise story. Hopefully GuixSD[1] can plug that hole due to the GNU brand as it has been progressing nicely.

[1]: https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/

GuixSD is just as disconnected from the Linux Standard Base as NixOS.

We've also built https://github.com/vpsfreecz/vpsadminos recently which is based on not-os / NixOS

RancherOS: http://rancher.com/rancher-os/

Rancher is awesome. As was CoreOS, and I am really pissed RH bought them out. RH manage to break everything they touch.

Linuxkit: https://github.com/linuxkit/linuxkit

Fedora / CentOS Atomic, which is Redhat's "clone" of container linux.

Atomic (or at least OStree) predates ContainerLinux by quite a bit.

Also Atomic is more than just an OS; it's a system of reliable upgrades / versions switching. So it's got something in common with NixOS.

Sort of, but not quite. I'm familar :)

I used to be a gnome foundation member (I trained Andrea Veri on the sysadmin team who trained Patrick Uiterwijk, the current lead sysadmin for GNOME) when Colin Watson wrote OSTree. He was talking about it and some of the ideas from it at the KDE/GNOME desktop summit in Berlin (2011ish) in some of the comments after https://desktopsummit.org/program/sessions/improving-how-we-...

At the following Boston (GNOME) developer summit one of the big conversational points sans Ubuntu pulling away from GNOME to build Unity was the idea of GNOME OS because Linux was hard then. He built rpm-ostree after that, and it was after CoreOS as a distro was a thing.

rpm-ostree's first commit was Dec 21, 2013: https://github.com/projectatomic/rpm-ostree/commit/958dfa435...

https://coreos.com/blog/coreos-fourth-birthday CoreOS as a company was created on July 13th, 2013.

TL;DNR: It's complicated, but Atomic as a distro most definitely does not predate ContainerLinux as rpm-ostree didn't exist when CoreOS the company was founded.

OStree's mailing list starts in April 2012. I'm sure Colin did a bunch of work before then.

Oh OSTree was definitely around then, but it wasn’t building a competitor to ContainerLinux until rpm-ostree, which made it insanely powerful in that it could build images from existing (and pervasive) redhat package repos. I’m definitely not arguing that much whatsoever. Only that it wasn’t building a full distro in a way to put it on par with ContainerLinix until after ContainerLinux was a thing and CoreOS was a company.

Thanks for the info and I agree. Also thank you for your work for Gnome. Awesome!

Forgive me for poking around a little more but I like reading computer history. That rpm-ostree first commit was an import from something called pkgsys-ostree. The first commit in pkgsys-ostree was only a little earlier; Aug 2013.

Heh, good on you for digging deeper. I think ultimately, the two were developed pretty much independently (Atomic and ContainerLinux), one from ChromeOS, and the other from Fedora / RHEL. They both prove the idea of a small container only os with atomic updates is a solid design to build a container orchestration system (k8s/openshift) ontop of. I'll still stand by the gist of my original comment though in that CoreOS was a thing before Atomic and they had a working P.O.C. before ostree was used to build an entire distro (such as atomic). Either way, we both learned something new so net win.

Common only in very high-level concept as the implementation details are vastly differing. NixOS is based on the Nix[1] purely functional package manager and configuration language while OSTree is termed to be "git for operating systems"[2].

[1]: https://nixos.org/nix/ [2]: https://ostree.readthedocs.io/

Atomic doesn't predate CoreOS.

CoreOS = 2013 Atomic host = 2014

OSTree (the foundation for it) was built as part of GNOME Continuous in 2011.

Yup, what I sort of alluded to in my comment above re: GNOME OS, however I was saying CoreOS the distro predates rpm-ostree. Colin was talking about some of these ideas in Berlin circa 2011 at the desktop summit (isn't that where we met btw? I forget).

Scale dude!

Gnome booth wet bar... too much good whiskey was consumed. I need to get back to that.

Absolutely.

But Atomic was architected as containers infrastructure and is/was a direct competitor to CoreOS and other lightweight container OSes.

It might appear that way to people that weren't involved in the history, but a lot of it was based on ideas learned from stateless linux, circa 2004.

People in the desktop team had been working on read-only root OS's for a long time, and it was only at a certain point that RH management bought off on forming a product/spin. But to say that work only started once Atomic was a thing would be inaccurate.

It's probably fair to say that ChromeOS/CoreOS lit a match under some upper management though.

There's Alpine Linux. https://www.alpinelinux.org/

Intel's Clear Linux is yet another option.

Alpine for sure.

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