So, bare-metal Linux would be great to just run my production Elixir Phoenix apps, but a minimal docker based Linux is great for development and online playground.

Something that can do both well while having a very small footprint would be great.

My main goal is to find a distro that just has the packages I really need, not a bunch of bloatware that just add security concerns.

Yep, same here. I’ll follow your comments or posts (if you post) on the topic. Sadly I don’t have much bandwidth now but I am after the same thing. I am looking into spending ~3000 EUR for a mid-range headless Linux workstation (but will still operate it through my iMac Pro; world-class display after all! plus don’t want to buy a third set of keyboard+mouse ) and want to heavily utilize Docker/Podman and Kubernetes/Nomad on it.

For that, I really want the absolute minimal Linux for containers (though I would be overjoyed if its super-minimal size can be translated to bare-metal but it’s not my priority).

Well Rancher products normally use docker-machine in the examples, thus they must be developed in Macs

No idea about the others…

Here it his an interesting explanation about the SmartOS virtualization at the Operating System level:

https://wiki.smartos.org/smartos-virtualization/

Joyent SmartMachines are Based on Solaris Zones¶

Which gives us:

• CPU scheduling
• network virtualization
• security

Zones virtualization was added to Solaris 10 in 2005.