You can look at CoreOS the same way as the Xen hypervisor and VMWare ESX: the more flexible these became (new hardware drivers, supported configurations, etc. etc) the more they began to look like general purpose operating systems. At which point, why not start with one? (Kvm followed the same logic)
I'd much rather see the guts of CoreOS available as e.g. a RHEL or Debian package. As it stands, throwing away 20 years of distribution experience just to avoid installing a few files on my server seems far from worth it.
When you're done there, now try plugging your nice new machine into the corporate DC. Oh it seems it needs to support VLAN tagging. No problem, better just write some new code for that.
Time to migrate a bunch of performance sensitive services. Uh oh, no support for FusionIO PCI SSDs! Better write some more code.
Time to migrate your remote sites, only policy dictates certain services must be physically encrypted. No problem, better just cutpaste Debian's cryptsetup scripts and be done with it.
Oops, turns out we deployed 1000 machines with a duff BIOS setting. No problem, I'm sure the server vendor has a support package for CoreOS..
We could come up with examples until we've basically reinvented a modern Redhat/Debian initramdisk and boot environment.
https://github.com/coreos/coreos-overlay/
Must have been a good idea that no one got.
Sadly one of the dumbest arguments ever that will blacken the Linux horizon for decades, big dick syndrome over what Linux distro you run.
