It's surprising to see so much popularity in mu4e in this threads when no one mention Gnus, I am too much 'hardwired' in gnus and don't think i have the 'courage' to try something else but someone would know how does it compare ?
I would imagine the most important thing from a distro is the support from the downstream vendor (i.e: canonical or red hat) that comes with it. Downloading and compiling from source to a minimal distro (like what alpine does it seems) is nice and all but would be limited for toys/dev deployments and not sure how i would get my CTO convinced to use those images instead of officially supported one from a reputed vendor cause the benefits are a few mbs (and freeness obv) gains
I think it's hard to compare RedHat to Mirantis even tho they are taking a bit of market to them they are not playing in the same league, it's like to say Docker is a great competitor to Vmware inc,
I like how OpenShift3 is building on top of existing OpenSource technologies and not reinventing the wheel like other OSS Paas have done (i.e: cloudfoundry)