Exploring openSUSE's MicroOS
No Change!
© Photo by Lauren Mancke on Unsplash
If you want the most recent software without sacrificing stability, try running a minimal Linux distribution then adding additional services and applications in containers. OpenSUSE MicroOS provides a robust foundation for implementing this vision.
Open source software development happens so rapidly that the distributions can't keep pace and often still have older versions in their repositories. Or, even if you don't have old software, running multiple services or applications on the same operating system sometimes results in compatibility issues.
If your goal is to run a couple of services in a reliable way, you'll likely find yourself using a container-based solution like Docker or Podman. But even then, you still need to manage that underlying Linux distribution. In an ideal scenario, you would want to only deal with the containers and forget about the host system.
Several Linux distributions have introduced minimal systems that offer only the packages necessary for running containers. You can't install any software directly on such a system; you can only install software in containers. You also don't need to manage or update anything after the initial configuration process. This kind of operating system is somewhat exaggeratedly called an immutable OS.
[...]
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
US / Canada
UK / Australia