MicroOS & Kubic: New Lighter Minimum Hardware Requirements

You Spoke, We Heard

openSUSE MicroOS has been getting a significant amount of great attention lately.
We’d like to thank everyone who has reviewed and commented on what we are doing lately. One bit of clear feedback we received loud and clear was that the Minimum Hardware requirement of 20 GB disk space was surprisingly large for an Operating System calling itself MicroOS. We agree! And so we’ve reviewed and retuned that requirement.

New Minimum Storage Requirements

The New Minimum Supported Storage Requirements for MicroOS are

• 5 GB for the read-only / (root) partition, with 20GB as the recommended maximum size.
• 5 GB for the read-write /var partition, with 40GB as the recommended size, or however large you require for your workloads.

Please Note, a standard installation of the minimal MicroOS system role currently uses no more than

• 450 MB with bare metal hardware support.
• 285 MB without bare metal hardware support.

Therefore these new lighter requirements still ensure that your MicroOS installations have plenty of room for many automated snapshots from transactional-updates. These changes will not compromise the promise that MicroOS can be updated and rolled back atomically without worry.

MicroOS Desktop Differences

The MicroOS Desktop, which is currently in Alpha and being actively developed, has a subtly different minimum requirement, as a result of its different use case.

• 5 GB for the read-only / (root) partition, with at least 40GB recommended, or however large you require for your desktop.
• /var and /home are provided as read-write noCoW sub-volumes as part of the / (root) partition for the storage of containers, flatpaks and user-data.

Available Now

These changes have all been submitted to openSUSE:Factory, tested in openQA, and will soon be released as part of Snapshot version 20201121. They will soon be available for both MicroOS and Kubic across all ISO, Cloud, and VM Images.

Thanks and have a lot of fun!

The MicroOS & Kubic Team