this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2023
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Linux
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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docker images have a ton of extra processes from the OS they were built in. Normally a light distro is used to build images, like Alpine Linux. but still, you're executing a lot more processes than if you were installing things natively.
Of course the images does not contain the kernel, but still they contain a lot of extra processes that would be unnecessary if executing natively.
Containers don't typically have inits, your process is the init - so no extra processes are started for things other than what you care about.
To execute more than one process, you need to explicitly bring along some supervisor or use a more compicated entrypoint script that orchestrates this. But most container images have a simple entrypoint pointing to a single binary (or at most running a script to do some filesystem/permission setup and then run a single process).
Containers running multiple processes are possible, but hard to pull off and therefore rarely used.
What you likely think of are the files included in the images. Sure, some images bring more libs and executables along. But they are not started and/or running in the background (unless you explicitly start them as the entrypoint or using for example
docker exec).