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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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Alpine as a desktop OS (lemm.ee)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

38 comments fedilink hide all child comments

This might be the dumbest stuff anyone has asked here, but has anyone tried running Alpine as a desktop base OS? Seems pretty well stocked when it comes to the repo, and it's light asf.

Thoughts?

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[–] banshee 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I almost feel bad that I haven't. I've used their documentation for years but never installed the distro. Most recently I've been having fun with NixOS.

[–] JustAnotherKay 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I wanna get into Nix but I keep bouncing off the documentation every time I try to study it

[–] banshee 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I currently use NixOS and nix-darwin, and I've enjoyed the ride so far. I use flakes with direnv for reproducible development environments, and this has been working out well. I've also been impressed with using Nix to build OCI containers.

The learning curve isn't flat, but the ecosystem is fantastic.

[–] JustAnotherKay 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Makes sense; one of the big things about it that interests me is the dockerfile generation. Although, I should probably get a better understanding of dockerfiles themselves before jumping into that; I have a habit of forgetting the order of carts and horses

[–] banshee 3 points 3 months ago

Dockerfiles act as instructions for the docker (or compatible) CLI to use for building OCI container images. Images may or may not have layers and can be exported as a tarball for inspection (with tools like dive).

Nix provides native support for building container images, and the resulting archive must be loaded using docker load. There is another library (nix2container) that aims for better performance and relies on skopeo for copying the built image to a docker-compatible server, local or remote.

Just wanted to share a some of the information I've learned. Cheers!