Once you get past the honest definition of Agile… ugh. CoreOS was my first experience with auto updating operating systems. It takes a while to get used to the fact that the OS was going to reboot itself but when teamed with docker, swarm, and later, kubernetes it makes perfect sense in a lights out operation. Keep in mind that since the timing could go sideways it’s better to pay for the admin services so you can control the process for the sake of the operation.

CoreOS has decided to go EOL and so I’m moving everything to ClearLinux. CoreOS was ideal because the host was essentially immutable and everything “user” needed to be installed in a docker container. (docker/containers being a separate discussion). The ClearLinux distro is a good balance between the immutable CoreOS and the wild west of Fedora or debian…

The only downside to ClearLinux is also it’s strength. ClearLinux releases about 9 times a week. And while I can reboot my machine(s) any time and I rarely worry about incompatability the adence between the desktop and server model is the same and the desktop reboots are less convenient.

One other Linux Distro under evaluation is Pop-OS however they do not seem to have a headless distro… waiting to hear back.

AND unrelated to linux distros there are the apps that follow a similar candence. For example gitlab provides at least one update a week. My problem here is that in the last 2 years there have been a number of releases that have either damaged my code or my installation. The letsencrypt does not work well in my haproxy configuration and any kind of failure takes me off the air. If this was a normal commercial development environment we’d stop working. And that could be costly.