Somewhat related, potentially, maybe, to the homelab discussions of @Byron C and @meandmymouth i've been looking at immutable/'micro' distros which mostly seem to be intended to run containers atop something like a pi or a modest VM. Long story short... i'm struggling to wrap my head around them so i'm putting the questions out there - Anyone used such distros [SUSE MicroOS, Fedora CoreOS or the like]? What did you use them for? Are/were they the monumental pain in the arse to set up work with as they appear to be?
I’ve not actually used any of these directly, I’ll be honest. I do prefer the most lightweight image possible for Docker containers, so if there’s a container image based on Alpine Linux for whatever software I’m trying to run, I’ll probably use that one. But it gets a bit messy when you start having to add custom components/libraries in order to deploy a custom image. For me, that’s the main limitation with these extremely cut-down Linux distributions: they lack many of the package management and userspace tools that I’m familiar with. If I had to choose… I’d probably pick Ubuntu Core, purely because Ubuntu is the distro I’m most familiar with.
On Proxmox, I have a "CT template" call "debian turnkey core". I run it as an LXC and then install Docker to run everything. This allows me to easily back it up with standard Proxmox backup scheduling. Similarly I wanted something lightweight but not too cut down that I can't follow online tutorials. I don't remember running into any problems following tutorials for running stuff on Debian.
I've also not used any of those distros mentioned. Similar to wyx087 I use a specif image under Proxmox, however it's a VM image instead of CT template. I use the ubuntu cloud images as they are pretty lightweight and then use cloud-init for basic configuration like default user, password, hostname, ssh key, networking etc. A good guide on this here - https://technotim.live/posts/cloud-init-cloud-image/
