

I find this comparison unfair becuase k3s is a much more batteries included distro than the others, coming with an ingress controller (traefik) and a few other services not in talos or k0s.
But I do think Talos will end up the lighest overall because Talos is not just a k8s distro, but also a extremely stripped down linux distro. They don’t use systemd to start k8s, they have their own tiny init system.
It should be noted that Sidero Labs is the creator of Talos Linux, which another commenter pointed out.
I’ve tried snap, juju, and Canonical’s suite. They were uniquely frustrating and I’m not interested in interacting with them again.
The future of installing system components like k3s on generic distros is probably systemd sysexts, which are extension images that can be overlayed onto a base system. It’s designed for immutable distros, but it can be used on any standard enough distro.
There is a k3s sysext, but it’s still in the “bakery”. Plus sysext isn’t in stable release distros anyways.
Until it’s out and stable, I’ll stick to the one time bash script to install Suse k3s.