docs VS Flatcar

ublue is based off of fedora and rpm-ostree, which is what "CoreOS" is today.

What happened was old school CoreOS was A/B partition based: https://github.com/coreos/docs/blob/master/os/sdk-disk-parti...

My memory is hazy but here's how I remember it: After Red Hat acquired CoreOS they rebased the entire thing around rpm-ostree, which is the CoreOS people know today: https://coreos.github.io/rpm-ostree/

At the time there was some anxiety in the community as to what would happen, as there was no direct upgrade path from old CoreOS to new CoreOS. Theoretically if we all believed the kool-aid we were drinking it's just a redeploy, no pets!

Kinvolk came along, forked it, and made Flatcar Linux, which kept the A/B partitioning system, and more crucially, let you just change a config file and all your old CoreOS nodes would just move to Flatcar and then you were good to go. So now if you wanted to stay on the system you were comfortable with you could just use Flatcar. If the composability of rpm-ostree attracted you then new CoreOS have you covered. Red Hat deserves a hat tip here because in their documentation/blog they explicitly mentioned Flatcar as an option for people who wanted to stick with what they know, which I thought was cool and how I discovered it!

Later on Microsoft acquired Kinvolk and and then people raised eyebrows. I have not checked in a while but the folks involved continued to do their thing and run it like a good OSS project, hold public meetings, all that stuff.

I use both and they're both high quality.

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.

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