There's definitely overlap in functionality between RancherOS and LinuxKit, but there are also a few pretty big differences.
- LinuxKit seems designed to be a piece that can be used to build a Linux distro but isn't a full distro out of the box like RancherOS
- As far as I know LinuxKit is still based on Alpine whereas RancherOS is custom and doesn't have much of a host filesystem
- LinuxKit is based on containerd and RancherOS is still based on Docker (though this is likely to change soon)
We're definitely interested in collaborating with LinuxKit since we do have similar goals. It's probably a good idea for us to write a more detailed blog post comparing the two since we've been getting this question pretty often lately.
LinuxKit is not based on Alpine - earlier versions before open sourcing were. We build our system containers from Alpine though, so there is still a connection. (I work on LinuxKit).
We considered using Alpine as the base image for our system containers for a time. They're still built using Buildroot currently, though we're playing around with another project that we might use instead.
- LinuxKit seems designed to be a piece that can be used to build a Linux distro but isn't a full distro out of the box like RancherOS
- As far as I know LinuxKit is still based on Alpine whereas RancherOS is custom and doesn't have much of a host filesystem
- LinuxKit is based on containerd and RancherOS is still based on Docker (though this is likely to change soon)
We're definitely interested in collaborating with LinuxKit since we do have similar goals. It's probably a good idea for us to write a more detailed blog post comparing the two since we've been getting this question pretty often lately.