One interesting fact is that minikube actually used to be very similar to k3s. (I used to be a maintainer of minikube)
We called it localkube, and it was an all-in-one binary with features stripped out that ran the kubelet, apiserver, kube-proxy, etcd, and other components as Go routines. Eventually it had to be removed - upstream k8s was moving too fast, and there were fundamental issues that couldn't be fixed without large patches (TPRs, the predecessor to CRDs were one).
The problem with this approach is that it requires a ton of maintenance and there can be subtle bugs that come up.
The other distinction not found on this list is that only Docker for Desktop and minikube are cross-platform solutions. Running Kubernetes and docker on Linux is somewhat trivial, but managing a lightweight virtual machine and adding that extra layer of abstraction is what makes it really difficult.
We called it localkube, and it was an all-in-one binary with features stripped out that ran the kubelet, apiserver, kube-proxy, etcd, and other components as Go routines. Eventually it had to be removed - upstream k8s was moving too fast, and there were fundamental issues that couldn't be fixed without large patches (TPRs, the predecessor to CRDs were one).
The problem with this approach is that it requires a ton of maintenance and there can be subtle bugs that come up.
The other distinction not found on this list is that only Docker for Desktop and minikube are cross-platform solutions. Running Kubernetes and docker on Linux is somewhat trivial, but managing a lightweight virtual machine and adding that extra layer of abstraction is what makes it really difficult.