I’m thinking about switching one of my boxes from Fedora Server to an immutable OS.

I’m leaning toward NixOS simply because of its Docker support — and a lot of software I play with in my homelab are easy to experiment with by just using their provided docker compose file.

Unfortunately podman and podman compose are often not 1-1 equivalent once they become complex and I’m too lazy to “translate” them.

#homelab #nixos #ImmutableLinux #fedora #docker

@treefifty if you're already on Fedora then why not try Bootc? Same fedora you know and (hopefully) love but with the benefits you're looking for as an Immutable OS

@SNThrailkill I’ve never looked into bootc. Very cool! One of my complexities is storing stateful data, which I normally do just by mounting a data directory to my container on the host. And I’m also running multiple apps on the same machine. So I’m not sure this is 100% a solution to my current problem but I am definitely going to play with this!

It appears easy to build images you can run on bare metal! It also always makes me happy to see quay.io in docs :)

@treefifty @SNThrailkill I think Sean meant using a bootc-based Fedora as your base system for running containers. (This is also exactly what CoreOS is meant for - https://fedoraproject.org/coreos/ - though I think official CoreOS images are still on rpm-ostree, which is the precursor to bootc).

If you really need docker rather than podman, you can derive your own bootc image with docker-ce or moby or whatever in it, see https://gitlab.com/fedora/bootc/examples/-/tree/main/docker . CoreOS includes both podman and moby-engine.

The container optimized OS

A minimal OS with automatic updates. Scalable and secure.

@adamw @SNThrailkill oh, that is cool! I worked very close with the old CoreOS folk when I was working on Quay. I think you just gave me a weekend project to explore and maybe write about :) Thank you for clarifying!

I also love the idea of running containers on bare metal as little appliances. I was considering doing that with micro VMs (eg Firecracker).

All wonderful suggestions!

@treefifty @adamw glad you found it! Here are the docs: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/bootc/getting-started/

If you need anything or see anything missing from docs let me know!

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