Is there something about this makes it red hat specific. An OS is just a specific collection of files in the end. Whether things are installed with rpm or Deb shouldn't matter?

You'd think so:) Unfortunately the current implementation hardcodes calls to dnf: https://github.com/osbuild/bootc-image-builder/issues/869

The project roadmap actually includes plans to expand beyond Red Hat family distributions - there's active work to add support for Debian/Ubuntu and potentially other distros.

I was going to try this to perhaps use it in production. Turns out the RHEL clones like Alma or Rocky doesn't have this thing in production-ready grade. All options you have now are owned by Red Hat themselves.

Just ask Neil Gompa to ship it. He doesn’t love it, but he helps everyone who asks him for advice.

Booting Docker images is fairly straightforward, I wrote about how to do this manually some years ago: https://blog.davidv.dev/posts/docker-based-images-on-baremet...

Ublue also builds Ubuntu versions of a lot of this.

bootc is a CNCF project now, so anybody can get on board.