An overview of single-purpose Linux distributions

This is one of those things that I&#x27;ve always been too scared to ask so I&#x27;m just going to ask it now: Is there a distro designed exclusively for running docker (and perhaps other) containers that also contains a friendly web UI for people who have no idea how docker actually works?<p>I&#x27;m familiar with Proxmox, but it doesn&#x27;t natively support docker.

This title feels pretty inaccurate. It&#x27;s not an overview of single-purpose Linux distributions, it&#x27;s an overview of a few Linux distributions whose single purpose is to host containers. I got excited to read about weird Linux variants for obscure use cases but this was very vanilla and disappointing.

This isn&#x27;t container-related like the article, but I recently came upon a specialized Linux in the wild. I bought a compact flash card off Amazon for to use as a drive in a Tandy 1000. I went to partition it and to my surprise it had a few partitions. One was an ext2 one that resembled some sort of root directory. Looking through the files, it appeared it was for a distro called AST Linux that was originally designed to run off compact flash and aimed at managing networked telephones. It also had firmware images for a Cisco SPA232D VOIP Adapter.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.astlinux-project.org&#x2F;about.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.astlinux-project.org&#x2F;about.html</a>

Interesting article. For folks who need to put together their own distro, especially for embedded applications, Yocto and Buildroot both lower the barrier to rolling your own and getting exactly what you need to something quite reasonable.

Back in the very early aughts I used to carry around to friends houses a binder full of movies also containing a bootable CD with some linux distro that existed explicitly for playing media. I don&#x27;t recall the name, it&#x27;s likely long dead.<p>When whatever movie we wanted to watch failed to play on their computer, likely due to codec problems (it used to be a hassle before VLC) I&#x27;d pop the bootable Linux CD in, reboot and bam we were watching the movie. It was great.

Interesting that alpine didn&#x27;t get mentioned, i thought that was the most common option for a slim Linux running inside containers.

FOSDEM talk about Fedora CoreOS, Ubuntu Core, openSUSE MicroOS, and Bottlerocket OS and how they all tackle the single purpose problem in their own way.

As a person who only occasionally needs Linux for specific purposes, something I‘d like is a well-supported mainstream distro for lightweight, high performance servers. Think NGINX, routers, local web proxies, that kind of thing.<p>Something akin to BSD but Linux. Ideally something that supports a two-stage deployment where you compile for the exact target CPU and then the final thing has no extraneous components at all.<p>Maybe Nix?

Hana Montana Linux is up there with Red Star Linux for my favorite distros

You can always have a vanilla Debian or vanilla Arch install and add things on an as-needed basis and build the OS from scratch, minimizing complexity and have them as single-duty OSes.

&gt; since all of the read-only parts of openSUSE MicroOS have now been moved to &#x2F;usr, the upcoming 4.2.0 release of transactional-update would also be able to apply new snapshots without rebooting<p>Huge improvement, reboot to activate was a major downside.

Is there a minimal or custom Linux image suitable for the following scenario? A custom Linux + web app combination:<p>- a Linux image that can upload to a VPS<p>- a Linux image including your web app and essential tools (web server, database)<p>- anything not needed from the Linux image is removed (tools, utilities)<p>The idea is that a custom Linux image (which includes your pre-installed web app) can be installed to any VPS: pre-configured to be Linux only for your web app. (Note: this a scenario <i>without</i> docker.)

This article says &quot;subscriber-only content&quot;, yet I&#x27;m not a subscriber. How am I able to read this article?

Finnix and other light distros:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jugad2.blogspot.com&#x2F;search&#x2F;label&#x2F;Finnix?m=0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jugad2.blogspot.com&#x2F;search&#x2F;label&#x2F;Finnix?m=0</a>

I have another type: a my-purposes-only elf&#x2F;linux distro without all the kludge and bloat of the &quot;other&quot; purposes.<p>:)

Weird how they didn&#x27;t mention openwrt at all