Hi all We are now building, testing, and shipping separate MicroOS installation media in addition to the long established Kubic Media You can download it today from https://download.opensuse.org/tumbleweed/iso/openSUSE-MicroOS-DVD-x86_64-Cur... Below are some FAQ's to explain why we're doing this, which will likely be a part of a future MicroOS website/blogpost/marketing. Meanwhile please download, play around, and let us know what you think! Feel free to question/add/comment/correct any of the FAQs also. FAQ === Q: What is openSUSE MicroOS? A: MicroOS is a Tumbleweed based operating system focused on being the perfect "single purpose" operating system. Q: What is meant by "single purpose" Operating System? A: Traditional Operating Systems are designed and implemented with an assumption that they will be deployed on a system that could do multiple tasks at once (eg. Web Server, and Mail Server). The operating system needs to therefore be designed in a particular way that allows the simultaneous running, maintenance, and upgrade of the OS and all the services atop it. This creates complex real world issues, such as ensuring multiple systems running the same OS all act the same way after upgrades, regardless of which services they run. A "single purpose" OS assumes that a single installed system will only be used for one task, with other tasks being handled by either other means or other systems. This could be multiple VMs or physical machines each running a "single purpose" OS, or using some kind of containerisation framework to provide multiple services. Q: What are the benefits of MicroOS for "single purpose" workloads? A: MicroOS is built around the same transactional-update stack long used in Kubic. Transactional Updates are the perfect update mechanism for "single purpose" systems, as they guarantee that the running system never changes, and that any changes that do occur happen in single atomic operations that can trivially be undone. With MicroOS Transactional Updates are automatic by default, patching the whole OS, rebooting and able to rollback without any user interaction. This makes it perfect for systems that need to be deployed, do one job, and keep doing it for a long time even while the OS and service provided are receiving updates for a long period of time. As a Tumbleweed derivative, MicroOS benefits from having all of the software packages available from regular Tumbleweed. This means Q: What system roles can be chosen when installing MicroOS? A: There are currently two system roles in MicroOS "MicroOS" which provides the standard MicroOS runtime environment, with no services installed or configured. "MicroOS Container Host" which adds the Podman so the system is ready and configured to run containers as its "single purpose". If you have any ideas for additional System Roles that should be offered with MicroOS, please reply with your suggestion. Q: What is the difference between MicroOS and Kubic? A: Kubic is now a derivative of MicroOS and identifies itself as such in it's /etc/os-release. Kubic has been and will continue to be focused on Containers and Kubernetes, whereas regular MicroOS is intended to be used for a more diverse range of use cases. The Kubic system role that was formerly called "openSUSE MicroOS" is now renamed "MicroOS Container Host" and is absolutely identical to the "MicroOS Container Host" provided by the MicroOS install media. Q: Will there be official qcow/vmware/vagrant images? A: Yes, absolutely. We would also expect there to be Raspberry Pi images soon as MicroOS should be a perfect fit for many users of that hardware -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-kubic+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-kubic+owner@opensuse.org