There is Dahlia OS which looks fairly promising but development takes time and it is only a small amount of people.
I like the idea of the OS being more embedded focused like Android and Chrome OS but I don’t want Chrome or Google.
Is there anything else I should look at?
Vanilla OS seems promising. Just released a new version too.
I think that is the goal of https://universal-blue.org/
I don’t play with anything Google packages with hardware. Privacy and security with google always means their privacy against their competitors and security means whomever google considers a risk.
Universal blue is closer to regular Linux but maybe it is still worth a look.
Also “cloud native” is a little off putting. I might just try Silverblue
Cloud native just means that it uses tools like distrobox. I have used both and ublue has way better defaults: preinstalled drivers, codecs, update tool. Aurora and Bluefin are very similar, one kde one gnome, but bazzite is pretty different, it comes with a bunch of gaming features and tools and waydroid
“Cloud Native” means uBlue’s OS images are basically Docker images, but meant tu run on bare metal instead of inside virtualization, that are built automatically with GitHub actions.
The project itself is super interesting. It’s not a distro, it’s an alternative automated build pipeline toolkit for Silverblue/CoreOS that lets anyone build their perfect atomic image. It’s still 100% Fedora+rpmfusion under the hood.
UBlue’s official images have massive quality of life improvements over Silverblue.
I’ve been very happy with both Silverblue and Kinoite. I’ve installed it to all of my workstations now and can’t imagine ever going back to a traditional distro.
Your comments suggest that you’re already aware of distros like Silverblue so, if I may ask, how are these different than what you’re looking for? Silverblue comes with several flatpaks installed, but you can easily remove these and you’ll be left with a pretty barebones ostree image.
I don’t think it’s embedded focused but have you checked out Vanilla OS?
I’ll look into it. I just like the idea of a very small base based on Buildroot or similar.
I think Vanilla OS might then be what you’re looking for. They’ve built up their immutable OS on several layers, and while most people will want the full desktop OS, if you want a very small base, maybe their Pico image is what you’re looking for? You should even be able to build on top of it to create your own, if you need to.
I thought it’s cool but it looks dead. Hopefully they can find new members to keep the project going