In recent times we saw a number of improvements to various image building tools. We have osbuild, kiwi-ng, mkosi, lorax, each one with different configuration philosophy and language, build mechanism, features and possible outputs. It's fairly easy to do a superficial comparison that looks at the configuration format and the list of features, but it's much harder to get a good feeling for the the implementation choices and details.

In this panel the developers from the different projects will discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the different projects, make comparisons, and answer questions from the audience.

Some important differences between the projects:

• an API for developers (or the lack thereof). Kiwi has it and it's considered important, mkosi does not.
• a human readable image description. Mkosi uses ini-files, Kiwi uses xml/json/yaml, OSBuild defines the distributions in code, Lorax uses kickstart…
• different output formats, support for signing, file systems.
• unprivileged operation with no device access (via systemd-repart)
• support in build "orchestrators" like koji or OBS. Koji recently gained support for Kiwi and OSBuild, but doesn't support mkosi.
• support for reproducible builds