resinOS is designed for embedded devices, already supports many of them running several architectures (all the way down to ARMv5). While I have heard that rancherOS can run somewhat on a raspberry pi, that's a long way from being able to properly function in an embedded environment (read-only rootFS, reliable networking and DNS stack, support for atomic host updates, etc). There's nothing we'd like more than to have someone make the OS for us, but at this point we're pretty sure we'll have to do it ourselves. The variance in the embedded world is simply too large for a cloud OS to handle it without major rearchitecting.

"everything" running in a container is pretty much the difference.

RancherOS has a built in Go PID1 that starts a system Docker for the system services, and a user Docker that you then run your apps in.

This also means your console, and user container run time is a switchable container image.

Yep, RancherOS works on ARM, and we're building out our build and test infra.

Mostly, we're all working, cribbing off each other to get to our individual goals.