That’s great, thanks! I really appreciate the detailed response and the links.

The methodology IS cloud native

Ok great. Is it also fair to say that cloud native is the methodology? Or is cloud native a higher order concept that the methodology can fall into? I.e. rock is music, but music is not rock.

Dude, thank you for this. IMO reducing that down to simply “cloud native” is doing a disservice to how absolutely cool that methodology is.

I loved RancherOS in the server space, and always wished there could be a desktop version of it, but I realize that the isolation of docker on docker would be very difficult to deal with for desktop applications. From your description, I feel like Bazzite has done the next best thing.

If I may frame things in RancherOS terms and perspective briefly, given your description of what’s going on with Bazzite, the System Docker container image is being built in the cloud every day, and you could pull it down, reboot, and have the latest version of the OS running. The difference, I am gathering from context, is that while RancherOS “boots” the system image in docker, Bazzite simply abandons RancherOS’s hypervisor-esq system docker layer, and does something like simply mount the image layers at boot time (seeing as how the kernel is contained within the image), and boots the kernel and surrounding OS from that volume. The image is simultaneously a container volume and a bare metal volume. In the cloud, it’s a container volume for purposes of builds and updates, which greatly simplifies a bunch of things. Locally, the image is a bootable volume that is mounted and executed on bare metal. Delivery of updates is literally the equivalent of “docker pull” and a boot loader that can understand the local image registry, mount the image layer volumes appropriately, and then boot the kernel from there.

Do I have this roughly correct?

As someone who builds and deploys software in the cloud all day, seeing the term “cloud native” used for a desktop OS just reads as jibberish to me, no offense. Nobody can seem to explain clearly in simple terms what is actually meant by it.

Does it just mean all of the compilation of binaries and subsequent packaging have all been designed and set up to run in a uniform build pipeline that can be executed in the cloud? Or is bazzite just basically RancherOS (RIP) but for the desktop? I am seeing people in this thread talking along the lines of both of these things, but they are not the same.

Can you explain what the term “cloud native” means as it relates to bazzite in a way that someone who can build Linux from scratch, understands CI/CD, and uses docker/kubernetes/whatever to deploy services in the cloud, could grok the term in short order?

This is going to be a super weird request for a handful of reasons, the first being that you already abandoned watching it, but for some reason I am just super curious what your review in particular would be if you watched the whole thing, just for the sake of it now that you’ve said that, and came back to tell us. Other reviews be damned, something about your reaction to it is interesting for some reason, which makes your opinion of it in full compelling, if you’d consider humoring us. I’m serious.

If you thoroughly enjoyed the show, you will be tickled by The Good Place: The Podcast. Mark Evan Jackson (Shawn) hosts it, and it’s truly excellent. Lots of behind-the-scenes info from people who are truly dedicated to their craft. If you thought the characters were great, the people and writers behind them are even cooler, and you get to hear so much neat stuff about the show from them.

Michael Schur also wrote (an often hilarious) book called How to Be Perfect, about what he learned about philosophy from the research he did in order to write the show. If you get the audiobook version, parts are narrated by some of the actors from the show, and it’s just a delight as a fan. I don’t think anyone would become a philosophy expert from the book, but it’s an introduction to it, and amusing to boot. A good book IMO.