talos VS colima

Super cool. I always enjoy reading about systems that challenge, well, "ossified" assumptions. An OS not providing a shell, for example? Madness! ... or is it genius, if the OS has a specific purpose...? It's thought-provoking, if nothing else.

I'm a bit skeptical of parts. For instance, the "init" binary being less than 400 lines of golang - wow! And sure, main.go [1] is less than 400 lines and very readable. Then you squint at the list of imported packages, or look to the left at the directory list and realize main.go isn't nearly the entire init binary.

That `talosctl list` invocation [2] didn't escape my notice either. Sure, the base OS may have only a handful of binaries - how many of those traditional utilities have been stuffed into the API server? Not that I disagree with the approach! I think every company eventually replaces direct shell access with a daemon like this. It's just that "binary footprint" can get a bit funny if you have a really sophisticated API server sitting somewhere.

[1]: https://github.com/siderolabs/talos/blob/main/internal/app/m...

[2]: https://www.talos.dev/v1.6/reference/cli/#talosctl-list

Where `kube.cue` sets reasonable defaults (e.g. image is /). The "cluster" runs on a mini PC in my basement, and I have a small Digital Ocean VM with a static IP acting as an ingress (networking via Tailscale). Backups to cloud storage with restic, alerting/monitoring with Prometheus/Grafana, Caddy/Tailscale for local ingress.

[1] https://www.talos.dev/

[2] https://cuelang.org/

Looks somewhat similar to the talos Linux project[1]

[1] https://www.talos.dev/

Talos Linux basically implements their entire userspace in Go and its similar to BottleRocketOS, because it is designed to host Kubernetes.

https://www.talos.dev/

You might be surprised to find that Talos os (linux distro for kubernetes) mostly uses Go: https://github.com/siderolabs/talos

I've been using a 3 nuc (actually Ryzen devices) k3s on SuSE MicroOS https://microos.opensuse.org/ for my homelab for a while, and I really like it. They made some really nice decisions on which parts of k8s to trim down and which Networking / LB / Ingress to use.

The option to use sqlite in place of etcd on an even lighter single node setup makes it super interesting for even lighter weight homelab container environment setups.

I even use it with Longhorn https://longhorn.io/ for shared block storage on the mini cluster.

If anyone uses it with MicroOS, just make sure you switch to kured https://kured.dev/ for the transactional-updates reboot method.

I'd love to compare it against Talos https://www.talos.dev/ but their lack of support for a persistent storage partition (only separate storage device) really hurts most small home / office usage I'd want to try.

If you’re interested in something not AWS check out Talos https://www.talos.dev/

It’s been around longer than Bottlerocket

Can't talk about work, but my homelab is Azure and Oracle managed k8s (AKS/OKE), with onprem Talos soon (Turing Pi 2). My Flux monorepo has the details. OKE performs noticably worse (update cycle, features, control plane performance), but it provides 4 ARM cores and 24GB RAM free so I can't complain

Talos

If you don't need a GUI, the following combo works pretty well:

- https://github.com/abiosoft/colima

- https://github.com/peterldowns/localias

You might look into CoLima as a way to get started.

https://github.com/abiosoft/colima?tab=readme-ov-file

Its user interface is Docker-like, using containers.

For full desktop, I've only used the commercial app "Parallels", which can set up an Ubuntu desktop for you. Also Fedora and Alpine and Debian I believe.

But

> I don't really have any resources to share. I just know how to boot a vmlinuz with an initramfs using QEMU, and decided to download the Linux kernel source code and try compiling it.

I highly recommend working through Linux from Scratch and possibly the Gentoo Handbook. It's a journey.

I could not find any guide how to add WASM container capability to Docker running on Colima. This guide provides a few Colima templates for exactly this, which adds WasmEdge, Wasmtime and Wasmer runtime types.

Colima runs much faster on Macos: https://github.com/abiosoft/colima

After docker desktop became unusable, I jumped to colima and never looked back. I still use the docker runtime in it (the non-proprietary part) but it also supports containerd. On Mac it's just a "brew install colima" and then "colima start"

I also install the compose and ecr credentials plug-ins (since I use ecr for my container registry.) It has the full functionality of docker desktop minus the UI, which I never used anyways.

https://github.com/abiosoft/colima

On my M1 Pro system, I have nothing but positive things to say about the experience of using Colima (https://github.com/abiosoft/colima). Quick to set up and fast to use.

I'd say Lima and Colima should be enough for most use cases:

https://lima-vm.io/

https://github.com/abiosoft/colima

The bash/zsh equivalent wouldn't be too hard, but I use fish.

[0] https://github.com/abiosoft/colima, https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Fabiosof...

[1] https://orbstack.dev [3], https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Forbstack.dev

[2] https://github.com/abiosoft/colima#customizing-the-vm and https://github.com/abiosoft/colima/blob/main/docs/FAQ.md#edi...

[3] I’m on OrbStack now, but it isn’t so much better at how I use Docker than Colima is that I think that it’s an instant buy, especially with the planned subscription model. If I used anything other than the Docker integration, I might think it's better, but as of right now, no.

I also have some issues with its insistence on asking for elevated permissions. I will never grant permission[4] to make a symlink to the "standard" Docker socket; context and `$DOCKER_HOST` work well enough. It should not ask if the permission hasn't been given once. I also worry about other "advanced" features that may need an elevated permissions helper[5].

[4] https://github.com/orbstack/orbstack/issues/281#issuecomment...

[5] https://github.com/orbstack/orbstack/issues/281#issuecomment... and following