this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
111 points (94.4% liked)

Linux

48655 readers
1119 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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.

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
all 34 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Alpine was never meant as a desktop distribution.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

And Linux was never meant to be anything more than a hobby project. We should all be using Hurd.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I've been using it as daily driver since four or five years now. At first it was a bit difficult, we had to wait for patches for musl a lot for common desktop binaries. But now I don't even remember waiting for an update and I don't have to compile some tools myself anymore. Everything is in the repo. Yes i agree, I don't need much, it just works flawlessly with River + Foot + Firefox + Helix and I try to keep it minimal. No games, not much graphical tools. apk is such a magical tool. Never broke my edge install with it... Like Arch did with AUR. And the last install that I did recently on a remote server was just so easy with 'setup-alpine'... Way better than five years ago. The only drawback is the documentation I think... I'm using the gentoo one, which is perfect for Alpine.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I mean you exactly underline what I said. You can use anything for desktop usage, depending on your requirements. But Alpine is not meant to be used like this. Or with requirements like yours, you basically could use anything, there is no really advantage of using Alpine for your specific needs compared to many other distros out there.

I am not saying nobody should use Alpine on desktop, its just false "advertising" if you proclaim its perfectly fine to be run a s such.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Works nicely as a phone distribution though (in the form of postmarketOS).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)
[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I like Alpine Linux very much and use it when I am going to containerize an application in docker. It's incredibly lightweight and has a very good security history.

[–] Obsession 21 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I recently pushed my company to move everything off of Alpine and onto Debian Slim

We had too many issues with musl that are incomprehensibly obscure and impossible to troubleshoot. Now the environment we deploy on is functionally the same to the environment our devs develop on

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

The v1.2.4 release might fix up some of your issues:

This release adds TCP fallback to the DNS stub resolver, fixing the longstanding inability to query large DNS records and incompatibility with recursive nameservers that don't give partial results in truncated UDP responses. It also makes a number of other bug fixes and improvements in DNS and related functionality, including making both the modern and legacy API results differentiate between NODATA and NxDomain conditions so that the caller can handle them differently.

Not that it matters much if you've already migrated away to a libc distribution.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Now the environment we deploy on is functionally the same to the environment our devs develop on

Isn't this one of the primary benefits of Docker?

Development, CI, and deployment environments can and should be the same.

[–] aaaa 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

We like Alpine because it doesn't run afoul of our outbound software license to distribute container images with it.

Of course most folks aren't distributing full container images with their licensed software, so this niche probably doesn't apply to most people.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

That makes sense!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Well it's what alpine linux is. 😂I use it in WSL, to run podman

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'd probably use Alpine to some capacity if NixOS wasn't a thing.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm trying to get into Nix but I'm too stupid for it or something

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

It has a steep learning curve in the beginning but so does every mildly complex thing.

If there's anything you're stuck with, make sure you seek help in the appropriate channels such as !nixos[email protected].

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I tried Alpine for a desktop installation. The package manager has surprisingly decent package set. And the performance is the best I found, for some reason applications starts faster. But I had to stop the experience because websites thats includes widevine didn't work. Its sad to say, but many softwares relies on non-standard glibc shit. With glibc instead of musl Alpine can be simply the best distro. If musl is not faster that glibc I don't think glibc will make Alpine slower.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

You can use glibc programs in Alpine using containers, chroots, Flatpak, etc.

This wasn’t on Alpine, but I used to run Steam on a musl Void Linux install in a chroot.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Alpine's main thing is musl. musl is a lot better than glib, but you have to compile for it, which means no proprietary software.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

The glibc can be introduced by an Alpine fork, so Alpine can stay pure.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Why is musl better than glibc? Looking at the licence, it's just your classic corporate cuckolding that always leads to a net decrease in upstream contributions

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

I've been playing around with Alpine recently and I quite like it. Now if I can just get my virtual desktop Alpine container to work correctly I would be very happy haha.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Very nice article. I mostly know alpine from postmarketOS, but maybe I should look at it on the desktop at some point.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I've been installing Gentoo on my every machine. But I realistically could install Alpine on those few that I don't use so often. At least I'm gonna test. It's been years since I used Alpine on any machine.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Alpine is pretty awesome. The reason I use Debian over it is mostly just because I’m more familiar with it. Though I don’t run alpine on a couple servers. The docs are also awesome.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I have a bunch of container images I build for Kubernetes using Debian as the base. With the recent release of Debian 12, maybe it’s a good time to look at re-basing on Alpine for the simpler stuff.