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Comment by makeitdouble | Hacker News Reader

So they could have called it "minimalist", "barebone", "stripped".

I share parent's view that it's marketed with the most provocative term to attract attention, where an appropriate name wouldn't have stirred enough controversy to their taste ?

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I'm quite surprised by this descriptive term also; in fact I've always (for years) called this type an "application container" since it only contains the files required by the primary process and doesn't have a standard init system (usually it is expected to handle PID 1 responsibilities in its primary executable or use a stub init (as when using e.g: systemd-nspawn --as-pid2 ... ).

In contrast a "system container" has a regular init system and likely also package management (although that is optional) but was created using a package manager so the miscellaneous package-installed files are usually in there.

They could, but "distroless" is already an estabilished name, I think pioneered by Google[1]. As someone close to this field, I immediately know what "distroless" means in this context, and it's unclear what "minimalist" mean (does it mean it's based on Ubuntu Minimal? Alpine? Distroless?).

[1]https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/distroless

those terms have already been used in various distro installers for installations that contain very little, but still all the setup for you to expand it into a full blown distro with the package manager.

The distroless images specifically don't give you a package manager, only specific packages needed for you to run.

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