I'll take care of the "What is this thing?" for you, OP.
Leap Micro is an ultra-reliable, lightweight operating system built for containerized and virtualized workloads.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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I'll take care of the "What is this thing?" for you, OP.
Leap Micro is an ultra-reliable, lightweight operating system built for containerized and virtualized workloads.
tell me if this is what I'm looking for. I build Lineage OS, which requires me to download a load of apps. I wish (analogy coming) I could manage everything like a npm project, where I can keep all the dependencies under a single dir. I want to use my package manager to handle the dependencies, rather than manually downloading the bins, mv-ing them to the dir, and setting the path. Once I've finished building, dispose everything with just one or two commands, leaving no footprint on my OS/machine.
I would love Slowroll or Leap, the tested packages of OpenSUSE using rpm-ostree. OpenSUSEs "immutable" model is worthless. It is not better than what Tumbleweed does with BTRFS snapshots
It's better in one way, in that updates are applied on reboot rather than pulling the rug put from under running applications. But I agree that it doesn't go all the way, as it doesn't provide a verifiable base system with clearly separated modifications. OSTree would be great.
Another possibility would be to distribute a base image as a btrfs send stream (possibly differential against previous versions) containing a compose-fs image and associated files. And then OS extensions could be installed with systemd-sysext.