Rancher did a simple comparison of OS' capable of containers. One thing that has my full attention is the FULL featured server OS' are not necessary any more and just open the attack surface area. This opens the enterprise environment to:

• tiny-commercial licensed OS
• build your own OS

And so this is it…

• Ubuntu is HUGE and they are selling a product called SNAP or CORE
• Fedora is another huge OS and they are offering an IoT varaition; but there is something odd about CentOS and Fedora
• Busybox works and it is opinionated by and for Docker
• Alpine Linux is a small distro that many docker containers are built upon but it also works on bare metal. In container mode it was compromized once.
• RancherOS is a awesome but it looks like the rancher team is letting it go. No changes in a year.
• k3os is Rancher’s latest OS offering, however, orchestrating a cluster is a challenge and maybe I should have used cloud-init.“Most of the user-space binaries comes from Alpine and are repackaged for k3OS. Currently the kernel source is coming from Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. Some code and a lot of inspiration came from LinuxKit”
• CoreOS - acquired by Red Hat and just not clear where it’s going but there is a fork.
• PhotonOS from VMware. Not too terrible

They each have niche features from immutability, secure packages, prepackaged features. There is a lot to choose from.