images VS Flatcar

Compare images vs Flatcar and see what are their differences.

Flatcar

Flatcar project repository for issue tracking, project documentation, etc. (by flatcar)
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images Flatcar
6 20
493 631
3.7% 1.4%
9.9 7.5
5 days ago 15 days ago
HCL Python
Apache License 2.0 Apache License 2.0
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

images

Posts with mentions or reviews of images. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-20.
  • Suas imagens de container não estão seguras!
    4 projects | dev.to | 20 Mar 2024
  • Chainguard Images
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Sep 2023
  • Musl 1.2.4 adds TCP DNS fallback
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Jul 2023
    I'm very sorry that we broke things for you.

    To be clear, nothing has changed with Wolfi. Wolfi is an open source community project and everything is still available there: https://github.com/wolfi-dev/.

    We have made changes to Chainguard Images - our commercial product built on top of Wolfi - which mean you can no longer pull images by tag (other than latest). Chainguard images are rebuilt everyday and have a not inconsiderable maintenance cost.

    The easiest way to avoid this is to build the images yourself. You can rebuild identical images to ours using apko and the source files in the images repo e.g: https://github.com/chainguard-images/images/blob/main/images... (note you can replace package names with versioned versions). You can also just use a Dockerfile with the wolfi-base image to "apk add" packages. Full details are here: https://www.chainguard.dev/unchained/a-guide-on-how-to-use-c...

    I agree that pinning is a best practice. The above blog explains that you can still do it using a digest, but I accept this isn't the simplest solution.

    If I can help any more, please feel free to get in touch - you can find me most places including twitter https://twitter.com/adrianmouat

  • Wolfi: A community Linux OS designed for the container and cloud-native era
    10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Jun 2023
    We needed Wolfi to be able to create minimal (distroless if you like) container images based on glibc with 0 vulnerabilities. Turns out a lot of other people are interested in Wolfi for various reasons, and we're more than happy to work with them.

    You definitely don't need to use Wolfi! But I would say, if you run containers you might want to check out Chainguard Images: https://github.com/chainguard-images/images

  • Creating Safer Containerized PHP Runtimes with Wolfi
    3 projects | dev.to | 3 Mar 2023
    In this article, we'll see how to leverage Wolfi to create safer PHP application environments based on containers. To demonstrate Wolfi usage in a Dockerfile workflow (using a Dockerfile to build your image), we'll create an image based on the wolfi-base image maintained by Chainguard. The goal is to have a final runtime image able to execute a PHP command-line script. By definition, this image won't be completely distroless, because it will require APK to be present in order to install system dependencies described in the Dockerfile. For building pure distroless images, you should have a look at apko.

Flatcar

Posts with mentions or reviews of Flatcar. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-04-14.
  • Linux fu: getting started with systemd
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Apr 2024
  • Bottlerocket – Minimal, immutable Linux OS with verified boot
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 23 Sep 2023
  • Wolfi: A community Linux OS designed for the container and cloud-native era
    10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Jun 2023
    Sounds like you're looking for the CoreOS Linux successor FlatCar https://www.flatcar.org/

    It's actually based on some ChromeOS update tools under the hood but is a regular Linux distro, just super minimal and designed to run containers.

  • Flatcar Container Linux
    1 project | /r/patient_hackernews | 9 Apr 2023
    1 project | /r/hackernews | 9 Apr 2023
    1 project | /r/hypeurls | 9 Apr 2023
    1 project | /r/CKsTechNews | 9 Apr 2023
    14 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 9 Apr 2023
    I guess if you found my comment to be "comically hyperbolic" then replying to mine with a "comically reductionist" is fair game

    So, anyway, I actually did dig up a concrete example of my experience with it, and I cannot link to the "Additional information" section but that is both why I think the thing was a mess and also why the Miroservices YT joke resonated: https://github.com/flatcar/Flatcar/issues/220

    I think the CoreOS boot strategy was decomposed into a bunch of different executables, each responsible for doing their own little slice of the world. Maybe it drew inspiration from systemd in that way. But, just like my real life experience with microservices, it requires keeping a bunch of different projects and their upgrade paths in ones head, knowing their disparate config formats, and when one of them inevitably has a bug, understanding how to troubleshoot what went wrong with the system as a whole

    And, again in trying to be reasonable in this discussion[1] I do also understand why one would opt for the data URI, given how much of the rest of Ignition loads content from URLs. I don't believe cloud-init has that remote content paradigm baked into in nearly the same way, so I hear you about that.

    And yes, my belief is that JSON is a data-exchange format from _computer to computer_ and making people write them is a poor DX choice, IN MY OPINION. And, to reiterate, I know that CoreOS's perspective is that it is a computer-to-computer transmission from the transpiler-project-o-the-day to the Ignition binary, but that is predicated on one having access to that transpiler binary in all cases, which is quite different from the problem that cloud-init is trying to solve

    fn-1: I'm sorry you got hurt by my "tire fire" outburst, and that evidently derailed this whole interaction, but it was my experience

  • An overview of single-purpose Linux distributions
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Feb 2023
  • Linux Distro for Running Docker Containers in VM - Ubuntu, Alpine, or...?
    5 projects | /r/Proxmox | 25 Jul 2022

What are some alternatives?

When comparing images and Flatcar you can also consider the following projects:

fortigate-terraform-deploy - Deployment templates for FortiGate-VM on cloud platforms with terraform

bottlerocket - An operating system designed for hosting containers

rocker-versioned2 - Run current & prior versions of R using docker. rocker/r-ver, rocker/rstudio, rocker/shiny, rocker/tidyverse, and so on.

harvester - Open source hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) software

NuGet - NuGet Gallery is a package repository that powers https://www.nuget.org. Use this repo for reporting NuGet.org issues.

talos - Talos Linux is a modern Linux distribution built for Kubernetes.

horus - Free cloud native platform for service hosting

typhoon - Minimal and free Kubernetes distribution with Terraform

os - Main package repository for production Wolfi images

elemental-toolkit - :snowflake: The toolkit to build, ship and maintain cloud-init driven Linux derivatives based on container images

sbomnix - A suite of utilities to help with software supply chain challenges on nix targets

inspektor-gadget - The eBPF tool and systems inspection framework for Kubernetes, containers and Linux hosts.