{"slug": "bootc", "name": "bootc", "category": "os", "category_name": "Operating systems and desktop", "description": "", "recommenders": 5, "commenters": 16, "warners": 1, "score": 5.881, "rising": -1.64, "first": "2025-12-03", "latest": "2026-06-04", "why": "I recently converted my NAS from plain Debian to a custom bootc image based on Fedora 43 and I love it", "why_is_quote": true, "has_verdict": false, "sentiment": {"recommend": 5, "neutral": 8, "compare": 2, "warn": 1}, "spark": [0, 0, 1, 2, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0], "listed": true, "loved": [], "caveat": "", "short_quote": "I recently converted my NAS from plain Debian to a custom bootc image based on Fedora 43 and I love it", "kind": "", "icon": true, "domain": null, "github_repo": "github.com/bootcrew/mono", "official_url": "https://github.com/bootc-dev/bootc", "pricing": "", "aliases": ["bootc"], "verdict": null, "praise": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 774486801, "item_id": 48405425, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48405425", "by": "4llan", "date": "2026-06-04", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "rpm-ostree is being phased-out in favor of bootc[1]", "excerpt": "rpm-ostree is being phased-out in favor of bootc[1], which uses ostree in the underlying code. 1. https://bootc.dev/bootc/", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "rpm-ostree", "story": "Making Debian or Fedora persistent live images"}, {"id": 769161712, "item_id": 48072607, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48072607", "by": "mgrandl", "date": "2026-05-09", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I recently converted my NAS from plain Debian to a custom bootc image based on Fedora 43 and I love it", "excerpt": "I recently converted my NAS from plain Debian to a custom bootc image based on Fedora 43 and I love it. My entire config lives in git and can easily be updated with a push. I also moved from docker-compose for all my services to hardened quadlets which feel much more native and certainly more secure than my old setup. I would definitely recommend playing around with bootc. Very exciting tech. Now if bootc could apply", "context": "runs a home NAS", "use_case": "NAS operating system image", "switched_from": "Debian", "story": "Building a custom NAS/homeserver with Fedora CoreOS"}, {"id": 755117392, "item_id": 47194837, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47194837", "by": "YorickPeterse", "date": "2026-02-28", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I recently wrote about using it in", "excerpt": "For those looking for a more extensive article about bootc, I recently wrote about using it in https://yorickpeterse.com/articles/self-hosting-my-websites-using-bootable-containers/, including a comparison to some other existing tools.", "context": "", "use_case": "Self-hosting websites", "switched_from": "", "story": "Bootc and OSTree: Modernizing Linux System Deployment"}, {"id": 755079024, "item_id": 47192439, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47192439", "by": "pojntfx", "date": "2026-02-28", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "bootc and OSTree are both very neat", "excerpt": "bootc and OSTree are both very neat, but the bleeding edge of immutable Linux distros (GNOME OS, KDE Linux) is currently converging on a different proposal by systemd developers that's standardized by the UAPI Group (https://uapi-group.org/specifications/). It fixes quite a few of the complexities with OSTree (updates are handled by `systemd-sysupdate`/`updatectl` and are just files served via HTTP) and is quite a bi", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Bootc and OSTree: Modernizing Linux System Deployment"}]}], "caveats": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 755179760, "item_id": 47198735, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47198735", "by": "anglesideangle", "date": "2026-02-28", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "they are both more complex _and_ less capable than nixos.", "excerpt": "I often see bootc and/or buildstream uncritically presented as the future of the linux desktop, and find it somewhat surprising because, in my experience, they are both more complex _and_ less capable than nixos. To elaborate, I will separate linux operating systems into three categories: 1. traditional mutable package management (debian, fedora, arch, etc) - Bad model for obvious reasons, I won't get into this. 2. i", "context": "", "use_case": "image-based Linux OS", "switched_from": "", "story": "Bootc and OSTree: Modernizing Linux System Deployment"}]}], "who": [{"by": "mgrandl", "context": "runs a home NAS", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48072607", "date": "2026-05-09"}], "tags": [], "use_cases": ["bootable container images", "nas operating system image", "image-based linux os", "immutable os deployment", "self-hosting websites", "atomic os updates via oci images"], "compared": [{"slug": "rpm-ostree", "name": "rpm-ostree", "co": 2, "switched_from": 1, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "debian", "name": "Debian", "co": 1, "switched_from": 1, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "bazzite", "name": "Bazzite", "co": 3, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "nixos", "name": "NixOS", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}], "makers": [], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47189625", "title": "Bootc and OSTree: Modernizing Linux System Deployment", "mentions": 6}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47025085", "title": "Pocketblue - Fedora Atomic for Mobile Devices", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48360414", "title": "Making Debian or Fedora persistent live images", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48081245", "title": "Debian must ship reproducible packages", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48064246", "title": "Building a custom NAS/homeserver with Fedora CoreOS", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47204203", "title": "Mount Mayhem at Netflix: Scaling Containers on Modern CPUs", "mentions": 1}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {}, "2025-12": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-01": {"compare": 1, "recommend": 1}, "2026-02": {"neutral": 4, "recommend": 2, "compare": 1, "warn": 1}, "2026-03": {"neutral": 2}, "2026-04": {}, "2026-05": {"recommend": 1, "neutral": 1}, "2026-06": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-07": {}, "2026-08": {}, "2026-09": {}, "2026-10": {}}, "versions": [], "version_unnamed": 0, "family_ref": null, "runs_on": null, "lines": [], "quotes": [{"id": 774486801, "item_id": 48405425, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48405425", "by": "4llan", "date": "2026-06-04", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "rpm-ostree is being phased-out in favor of bootc[1]", "excerpt": "rpm-ostree is being phased-out in favor of bootc[1], which uses ostree in the underlying code. 1. https://bootc.dev/bootc/", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "rpm-ostree", "story": "Making Debian or Fedora persistent live images"}, {"id": 769328224, "item_id": 48083014, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48083014", "by": "suprjami", "date": "2026-05-10", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "bootcrew have bootc Containerfiles for Debian, Ubuntu, Arch, and openSUSE", "excerpt": "bootcrew have bootc Containerfiles for Debian, Ubuntu, Arch, and openSUSE: https://github.com/bootcrew/mono", "context": "", "use_case": "bootable container images", "switched_from": "", "story": "Debian must ship reproducible packages"}, {"id": 769161712, "item_id": 48072607, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48072607", "by": "mgrandl", "date": "2026-05-09", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I recently converted my NAS from plain Debian to a custom bootc image based on Fedora 43 and I love it", "excerpt": "I recently converted my NAS from plain Debian to a custom bootc image based on Fedora 43 and I love it. My entire config lives in git and can easily be updated with a push. I also moved from docker-compose for all my services to hardened quadlets which feel much more native and certainly more secure than my old setup. I would definitely recommend playing around with bootc. Very exciting tech. Now if bootc could apply", "context": "runs a home NAS", "use_case": "NAS operating system image", "switched_from": "Debian", "story": "Building a custom NAS/homeserver with Fedora CoreOS"}, {"id": 755898832, "item_id": 47243677, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47243677", "by": "gucci-on-fleek", "date": "2026-03-03", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "This is nice for things like bootc [0] that are deployed on the \"edge\"", "excerpt": "> unless you've done something very clever like 1 package per layer I struggle to think that 50 is really useful? 1 package per layer can actually be quite nice, since it means that any package updates will only affect that layer, meaning that downloading container updates will use much less network bandwidth. This is nice for things like bootc [0] that are deployed on the \"edge\", but less useful for things deployed ", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Mount Mayhem at Netflix: Scaling Containers on Modern CPUs"}, {"id": 755661265, "item_id": 47228829, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47228829", "by": "westurner", "date": "2026-03-02", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Bootc (osbuild) builds VM and native machine images from Containerfiles:", "excerpt": "With multi-stage Dockerfiles, you only copy the final, built application artifacts from the earlier stage(s). Then, building a package as one signed file to copy is justified and easier anyway. There's always: RUN dnf remove -y ansible && dnf clean all I thought there was a native way to build container images with ansible that don't have ansible installed in the image though? ansible/ansible-builder: https://github.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "BuildKit: Docker's Hidden Gem That Can Build Almost Anything"}, {"id": 755179760, "item_id": 47198735, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47198735", "by": "anglesideangle", "date": "2026-02-28", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "they are both more complex _and_ less capable than nixos.", "excerpt": "I often see bootc and/or buildstream uncritically presented as the future of the linux desktop, and find it somewhat surprising because, in my experience, they are both more complex _and_ less capable than nixos. To elaborate, I will separate linux operating systems into three categories: 1. traditional mutable package management (debian, fedora, arch, etc) - Bad model for obvious reasons, I won't get into this. 2. i", "context": "", "use_case": "image-based Linux OS", "switched_from": "", "story": "Bootc and OSTree: Modernizing Linux System Deployment"}, {"id": 755164304, "item_id": 47197769, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47197769", "by": "aaravchen", "date": "2026-02-28", "version": null, "stance": "compare", "quote": "", "excerpt": "Ironically the first implementation of ostree required an HTTPS server to serve the ostree commits, allowing a much smaller subset of what's needed to be transferred. However that became an adoption hurdle since it required unique infrastructure. Ostree switched to using containers because zstd allows compressed chunks now rather than the old all-or-nothing image layers, and the existing widespread container image re", "context": "", "use_case": "Immutable OS deployment", "switched_from": "", "story": "Bootc and OSTree: Modernizing Linux System Deployment"}, {"id": 755117392, "item_id": 47194837, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47194837", "by": "YorickPeterse", "date": "2026-02-28", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I recently wrote about using it in", "excerpt": "For those looking for a more extensive article about bootc, I recently wrote about using it in https://yorickpeterse.com/articles/self-hosting-my-websites-using-bootable-containers/, including a comparison to some other existing tools.", "context": "", "use_case": "Self-hosting websites", "switched_from": "", "story": "Bootc and OSTree: Modernizing Linux System Deployment"}, {"id": 755081232, "item_id": 47192577, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47192577", "by": "znpy", "date": "2026-02-28", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "not completely separated from bootc and ostree", "excerpt": "From https://uapi-group.org/ : > Contributing members include people from Ubuntu Core, Debian, GNOME OS, Fedora CoreOS, Endless OS, Arch Linux, SUSE, Flatcar, systemd, image-builder/osbuild, mkosi, tpm2-software, System Transparency, buildstream, BTRFS, bootc, composefs, (rpm-)ostree, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta. Note systemd, (rpm-)ostree and bootc. My understanding is that uapi is another initiative but not complet", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Bootc and OSTree: Modernizing Linux System Deployment"}, {"id": 755079024, "item_id": 47192439, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47192439", "by": "pojntfx", "date": "2026-02-28", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "bootc and OSTree are both very neat", "excerpt": "bootc and OSTree are both very neat, but the bleeding edge of immutable Linux distros (GNOME OS, KDE Linux) is currently converging on a different proposal by systemd developers that's standardized by the UAPI Group (https://uapi-group.org/specifications/). It fixes quite a few of the complexities with OSTree (updates are handled by `systemd-sysupdate`/`updatectl` and are just files served via HTTP) and is quite a bi", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Bootc and OSTree: Modernizing Linux System Deployment"}, {"id": 755059904, "item_id": 47191244, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47191244", "by": "mroche", "date": "2026-02-27", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "It is not, the future is currently pointing to composefs:", "excerpt": "It is not, the future is currently pointing to composefs: https://github.com/bootc-dev/bootc/issues/1190 There's a GitHub org that builds bootc-ready images for non-Red Hat family distributions using this backend. https://github.com/bootcrew", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Bootc and OSTree: Modernizing Linux System Deployment"}, {"id": 752953472, "item_id": 47059592, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47059592", "by": "arianvanp", "date": "2026-02-18", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Quote from https://bootc-dev.github.io/ tells me that bootc is using OCI as a delivery format", "excerpt": "> I gather that you think the boot images are distributed as OCI image Yes? That's literally the sales pitch on the website. Am I missing something? Quote from https://bootc-dev.github.io/ tells me that bootc is using OCI as a delivery format for bootable images. Transactional, in-place operating system updates using OCI/Docker container images. Motivation The original Docker container model of using \"layers\" to mode", "context": "", "use_case": "atomic OS updates via OCI images", "switched_from": "", "story": "Pocketblue - Fedora Atomic for Mobile Devices"}, {"id": 752450432, "item_id": 47028152, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47028152", "by": "nikodunk", "date": "2026-02-15", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "This is based on bootc", "excerpt": "This is based on bootc (bootable containers), so note that the OS build is described in a normal Dockerfile: https://github.com/pocketblue/pocketblue/blob/main/Containerfile which is then run by the Github action (or locally). Very similar to how Universal Blue, Bazzite, Bluefin etc. build at https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite (see their Containerfile), but for mobile. Has a similar mission to https://postmarketos.o", "context": "", "use_case": "Bootable container OS builds", "switched_from": "", "story": "Pocketblue - Fedora Atomic for Mobile Devices"}, {"id": 745538592, "item_id": 46596162, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46596162", "by": "porkloin", "date": "2026-01-12", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "", "excerpt": "Yes, and I think we're already seeing that in the general trend of recent linux work toward atomic updates. [bootc](https://developers.redhat.com/articles/2024/09/24/bootc-getting-started-bootable-containers) based images are getting a ton of traction. [universal blue](https://universal-blue.org/) is probably a better brochure example of how bootc can make systems more resilient without needing to move to declarative", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Cowork: Claude Code for the rest of your work"}, {"id": 744669393, "item_id": 46541837, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46541837", "by": "hollerith", "date": "2026-01-08", "version": null, "stance": "compare", "quote": "bootc can by itself completely replace rpm-ostree", "excerpt": "Bazzite is part of Universal Blue. Source: https://universal-blue.org/#images. The first paragraph of the home page of https://universal-blue.org/ ends with \"We produce a diverse set of continuously delivered operating system images using bootc.\" Another author explains: \"Bazzite utilizes bootc to manage the base image for your system, pin specific versions, and perform rollbacks when needed. For systems with customi", "context": "", "use_case": "Bootable OS images", "switched_from": "", "story": "Everyone hates OneDrive, Microsofts cloud app that steals and deletes files"}, {"id": 738212353, "item_id": 46138272, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46138272", "by": "mindcrash", "date": "2025-12-03", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "the bootc documentation which is the container runtime running at the core of Aurora", "excerpt": "When scrolling down I noticed that Aurora is based on Universal Blue (https://universal-blue.org/), a initiative to create Linux distributions based on the same containerization tech which sits behind the likes of Docker and Podman. You might find some extensive answers to your questions in the bootc documentation which is the container runtime running at the core of Aurora and other Universal Blue distributions, lik", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Aurora: The Linux-based ultimate workstation"}]}