Canonical's 'distroless' Linux images are a game-changer for enterprises

&quot;Distroless docker image&quot;<p>We already have this from docker itself.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hub.docker.com&#x2F;_&#x2F;scratch&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hub.docker.com&#x2F;_&#x2F;scratch&#x2F;</a><p>I don&#x27;t see how adding cannonical to our minimalist null distro adds any value. The idea of minimalism is to take away. What would they be doing anyway?<p>Sounds like a corp just wanting to get in a business. Antithetical to the idea of removing everything but the kernel.

They&#x27;re offering to build custom container images, with the applications configured to customer specification? And the customer is free to host the resultant container on any OS &#x2F; cloud provider of their choice. So it&#x27;s a paid service, not a product?

Am as skeptical of this as I am of &#x27;serverless&#x27; which also doesn&#x27;t mean much and isn&#x27;t true.<p>What does this <i>actually</i> mean and why do they hide it behind a nonsensical term?

I suppose now that they&#x27;ve containerized a huge amount of their repositories&#x27; userspace applications and they do much less work there (all pushed to upstream container makers) they can have those employees working to support other software than their open source OS.<p>&gt; Canonical plans to maintain the 2,000 widely used AI&#x2F;ML libraries and tools, including heavy hitters such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, and Rapids, as source code instead of as Debian&#x2F;Ubuntu deb packages.<p>That&#x27;s rough. Hopefully the desktop ecosystem doesn&#x27;t suffer. That said, 12 years sounds amazing! I wish this were applied to their actual desktop LTE and ESM and not commercial docker container using non debian package management.

This actually sounds like an amazingly simple (at least in principle), and probably effective solution to a problem that does exist that I didn&#x27;t realize needed to be solved.

Is this the beginning of the end of free Ubuntu?<p>Already, Canonical keeps pushing updates for &quot;Ubuntu Pro&quot;.

Do you really see that much of a runtime gain with scratch images (or distroless, same general idea) to justify using them? Not a criticism, I’m genuinely curious to hear from people experienced with both sides of this.

Is this a response to Chainguard? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.chainguard.dev&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.chainguard.dev&#x2F;</a>

If there is no distributed binaries, or executable files .. what exactly are they in the hook for supporting?

I don&#x27;t see how this is &quot;distroless&quot;.<p>Clearaly, this is a Canonical distribution.<p>Someone has to choose the exact combination of userland s&#x2F;w to include with the kernel. Whoever&#x2F;whatever chooses this s&#x2F;w is creating a distribution.<p>To this boomer yelling at the cloud, this is just more nonsensical hype, equivalent to &quot;serverless&quot;.

CrankyBear aka sjvn?

Honestly? Is another way to quickly push crap in an infra, crap because you can&#x27;t maintain nor know it enough, it will so stay for a looooong time, no one will know how to recreate it as needed, all will be done in hackish, quick and undocumented&#x2F;untraceable ways and so on.<p>Oh, I&#x27;ve no doubt some devs in Silicon Valley Mode and some managers will like it of course, as I&#x27;ve no doubt at a sudden point in future they&#x27;ll regret.<p>Ladies and gentleman&#x27;s it&#x27;s 2024, the era of containers MUST end for the sake of humanity, similarly to the previous full-stack virtualization on x86, it&#x27;s about time to go declarative like NixOS&#x2F;Guix System. The current typical infra is a big load of unmanageable, fragile crap with a so big attack surface that you have only to choose how to get TFU.