Rio's use of Linkerd vs Istio

I’m exploring the recent Rancher release as well as Rio (thanks Adrian Goins for turboing us all through the latter!). Newbie question here. Rancher 2.3 optionally enables slick metrics and dashboards via Istio. Rio uses Linkerd. Reading up a little, they seem like alternatives rather than complimentary. Given Linkerd, would there be an impact to Rio apps and Rancher features around monitoring, logging, alerting, security? Is Linkerd mutually exclusive with Istio? Maybe the answer is that containers get sidecars from both?

If there’s already a discussion around this I’d be interested to read up. Relative newbie here. I’m mainly looking to educate myself on Rio’s design and how it would be impacted by decisions made for a mesh within a cluster.

Stu

I found this answer on github https://github.com/rancher/rio/issues/900