While I am glad Silverblue is on this list, not having Fedora CoreOS on it too is a shame. FCOS is an amazing OS to run in production and it has come a very long way since the CoreOS acquisition. I find that FCOS is a good middle ground of being usable and easy to learn while still being immutable compared to Nix.
The FCOS devs introduced a new feature called CoreOS Layering which lets you define your system in a Dockerfile and FCOS will rebase to that state and all you have to do is reboot to configure your server. It is super powerful.
Anyways, your next project needs a VM, give it a shot. I made a Python based CLI tool to help you develop locally on a Linux workstation to create a Butane file to fit your needs. Below is the GitHub for Bupy and a good example of running an app (Paperless NGX) on FCOS with the CoreOS Layering features.
Thanks for making this tool and showing how to get started with the layering!
Do you have any thoughts you’d like to share on flatcar as the other project with CoreOS lineage?
As for me my main difficulties have been figuring out what to do with these projects in a bare metal environment. Building VM images is cool, but much of the time I want to do things like install to an existing drive or even onto a ZFS pool underneath.
I think Flatcar is alive and well. I haven't used it personally so I can't really comment much on it.
As for building VM images, I don't actually do that in my setup. I just use the base FCOS image, boot it with a barebones Butane to configure disks and then use the CoreOS Layering features to setup my workload.
Oh, CoreOS Layering looks really useful! I'm using openSUSE MicroOS today on some Raspberry Pi's and a x86_64 server. One reason I picked MicroOS was because it was quite simple to install on Raspberry Pi.
How hard is it to install CoreOS on a Raspberry Pis? Some installation guides on the Internet look quite complex...?
For raspberry pi projects, I've used https://fedoraproject.org/iot/ which has some rough edges but is great for runing some podman containers as systemd services. It (and all of fedora IIRC) requires a pi2 or greater (armv7 or v8/aarch64) though.
But I haven't actually tried CoreOS on a pi yet, could be interesting.
I actually use Fedora IOT in my datacenter rack to access my switches over LTE in an oh shit scenario. My uptime on my RPi3 B+ has been fantastic with this flavor of Fedora. I plan on switching over to FCOS on a RPi 4 soon tho.
I'm currently running Fedora IoT on a pi4B, it works very well for its purpose (running containerized services on Podman+Nomad). What does CoreOS offer over IoT?
The FCOS devs introduced a new feature called CoreOS Layering which lets you define your system in a Dockerfile and FCOS will rebase to that state and all you have to do is reboot to configure your server. It is super powerful.
Anyways, your next project needs a VM, give it a shot. I made a Python based CLI tool to help you develop locally on a Linux workstation to create a Butane file to fit your needs. Below is the GitHub for Bupy and a good example of running an app (Paperless NGX) on FCOS with the CoreOS Layering features.
https://github.com/quickvm/bupy
https://github.com/quickvm/fcos-layer-paperless-ngx
https://coreos.github.io/rpm-ostree/container/
https://github.com/coreos/enhancements/blob/main/os/coreos-l...
https://github.com/coreos/layering-examples