No thanks. I would prefer that Docker work equally well on as many base operating systems as possible. Having any form of coupling would turn Docker into another locked in platform which is exactly the opposite of the way I see the future of deployments.

I mean seriously you really want a single vendor owning the base OS of all servers ?

Have you actually tried CoreOS? Great idea.. needs some work.

Hint: Boot2Docker is actually what you want.

I'm working on an itty bittier jeos vm that allows basically any linux userland via docker (rhel, deb, arch etc). It'll ship with zfs and grsecurity on a long-term stable kernel. Completely open source, hackable (core src packages similar to arch PKGBUILDs) and rebuildable from source.

I have tried none of them, but I'm interested in any previous experiences. Can you share your problems with CoreOS?

CoreOS:

During our alpha period, Chaos Monkey (i.e. random reboots) is built in and will give you plenty of opportunities to test out systemd.[1]

Great. While I understand why they do this, I don't want to have to setup a cluster with automatic failover just to try it out.

And then there is etcd. I'd love to use etcd - all I want is a minimal Docker image with etcd installed. When I looked, it seemed like I had to either build it myself, or use a CoreOS image.

I know it's alpha software, but that isn't a great experience.

Boot2Docker[2] OTOH: one 24 M image, burn it to a USB stick, boot it (in about 5 seconds!) and now you have the perfect Dockerhost.

[1] https://coreos.com/docs/quickstart/

[2] https://github.com/steeve/boot2docker

We just added a doc that show you the (very easy) steps to prevent the automatic reboots: http://coreos.com/docs/cluster-management/debugging/prevent-...

Hope that helps.

We have an automatic build of an etcd container on the docker index if that helps you out as well: https://index.docker.io/u/coreos/etcd/

Thanks, and yes it does.

To answer your question, our priority is to make sure docker works great on every distro, large or small, old or new. As some of the answers below will show you, sysadmin-world is quite a fragmented place, and I don't think we should expect "one distro to rule them all" situation. Instead I expect we will see more and more niche players solving a specific set of problems for a specific group of sysadmins, catering to certain tools preferences (openstack, mesos, hadoop/yarn, cloud foundry, juju, systemd, and so on). I think CoreOS is showing the way for a lot of those future distros. We want to make sure docker can be a good citizen in all of them.