If GNU/Linux was unusable without various hacked-on helper frontends, none of which was comprehensive and none of which even tried to standardize, then yes that would be a red flag. In practice, you have things like Ubuntu putting a nice frontend on, but you also have things like the Arch folks, who explicitly refuse to provide an installer because the "manual" process is totally reasonable. So as an outsider, my understanding is that there are plenty of different k8s distros, and a lot of helper frontends (and no clear winners among them); are there people who find vanilla/handcrafted k8s okay? Is there an "Arch K8s" distro? Or even, is there an Ubuntu of k8s (successfully hides away the details and produces a clean working system that never requires a user to leave the comfort of the GUI)? Unfortunately, I don't have the domain knowledge to tell whether any given helper scripts are going to bite me down the road, so this is a genuine question from someone who'd like to get into k8s but can't see which option is sane.
> are there people who find vanilla/handcrafted k8s okay?
Yes, we do.
> Is there an "Arch K8s" distro?
Kubernetes the hard way is pretty much Arch
> is there an Ubuntu of k8s (successfully hides away the details and produces a clean working system that never requires a user to leave the comfort of the GUI)?
Kubespray etc.
> so this is a genuine question from someone who'd like to get into k8s but can't see which option is sane.
It completely depends on how much money your company is willing to spend on it. The larger the organization, the more it makes sense to go for "the Arch way". If you are a tiny start-up with single digit Devops folks, stick to managed offerings like GKE.
Basically most of what runs on k8s, including most of the k8s control plane, lives in a container. So for the most part, the only material concern about the host machine and OS is what kernel it is running, because that may limit what kind of jobs you can run in the containers.
