Come on in, chat about anything related to the Open Source community (especially in the Louisville KY area)
I have no experience with swarm or compose, but I have used Docker for a while, and I can say that Kubernetes helps me even on a single node cluster.
The ecosystem built around it has automated and abstracted out a lot of things I used to have to piece together and manually do myself. Automating the SSL cert process, DNS updating with DDoS protection & CDN providers like Cloudflare, creating storage replicated across the cluster where possible, setting up databases and web apps in one step that used to each have their own way to install, and it was a pain to get more than one of them running on the same server, etc.
It may be a lot of overhead for a getting started test / dev environment, and has a bit of a learning curve, but that learning of how to deploy an app on even a single node can pretty seamlessly scale and translate to a production environment with many nodes.
I'm partial to Debian and its descendants, but I hear good things about CoreOS / Container Linux / now Fedora CoreOS? (Maybe getting that wrong) I've just used Debian for many years and I'm familiar with how to tinker with it when things go wrong
As I understand it, the upcoming removal of Docker from Kubernetes does not mean that it won't still run containers built with Docker. Docker will still be useful for developing apps that run on Kubernetes. I could be wrong.