Not mentioned in this blog post is CoreOS, one of the leading operating systems in this category.

I'm happy to see the variety of operating systems coming out lately.

The very first link in the article leads to the previous post [1] that does mention CoreOS.

[1] http://blog.docker.com/2015/02/the-new-minimalist-operating-...

CoreOS is not huge but is also much bigger than these systems. The virtualbox image for example is 113MB compressed and 358MB uncompressed.

http://alpha.release.core-os.net/amd64-usr/current/coreos_pr...

I think that's only because they don't see CoreOS as "minimal" in the same sense as Rancher and boot2docker.

CoreOS isn't intended to be the base image of a docker container, it's meant to be the host for docker containers.

Boot2Docker and RancherOS are also meant to be hosts for containers.

OT: I really hate group blogs (more than one author) with byline at the bottom after the content.

The subject of the first sentence in the post is "I". I've no idea who this "I" is unless scrolling to the bottom.

Please place the byline below the title.

How do you feel about The Economist's publication style?

The Economist works hard at having a house writing style and a house viewpoint. You will never see "I" in an unsigned Economist article.

No, but you might see "This author..." sometimes instead. Economist does pretty well, but personality still seems into some of the non-editorials.

Not mentioned: https://github.com/ibuildthecloud/only-docker

(though it's more of an experiment than an OS)

I think that's what RacherOS does as well, which is interesting as they're claiming it's production ready! Only Docker seems neat, I'm loving all of these experiments.

The same guy (Darren aka "ibuildthecloud") is behind both projects. He is very prolific.

I'm not quite up to speed here, but aren't these simple linux user lands, running on a normal Kernel, and not actually real OSes that provide a new set of APIs to interact with the system?

I see all these "DockerOS", "RancherOS", "CoreOS" things and at the end it is just a kernel and a set of programs that take over the init process in a certain way.

Careful or you may fall into the 'What is an OS' discussion. :)

They are all kernels and suites of tools, namely Docker and usually Busybox. The primary objective in all cases is to have a minimal OS host for Docker containers so they can drop the normal suite of tools.

Seems like guys that can cram chess programs into less than 1k would be great for this type of development.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9151552

Text-only for those who can't load the page.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:eboGGnF...