Alpine was never meant as a desktop distribution.
this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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And Linux was never meant to be anything more than a hobby project. We should all be using Hurd.
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.
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.
expired
Works nicely as a phone distribution though (in the form of postmarketOS).
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
That makes sense!
Well it's what alpine linux is. 😂I use it in WSL, to run podman
I've never used Alpine as a daily driver, but it is nice. I always appreciate small and simple software.
I'd probably use Alpine to some capacity if NixOS wasn't a thing.
I'm trying to get into Nix but I'm too stupid for it or something
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].
I tried seeking help in an RTC channel as well, that's also a good tip! I'll give it another whirl!
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.
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.
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
yeah, fair enough, that's a good point. Also now that I think about it, the dns resolution in musl is pretty bad, too. But I do appreciate that musl is designed to be lighter weight than glib, and that it supports static linking.
The glibc can be introduced by an Alpine fork, so Alpine can stay pure.
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.
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.
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.
Very nice article. I mostly know alpine from postmarketOS, but maybe I should look at it on the desktop at some point.
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.
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.
Because its a "niche" distro (like OpenBSD) that does not have a "real" purpose. As in, its niche is not "mandatory" by any means.
It’s just a general purpose distro…
What is the “real” purpose of Debian or Arch?
And it’s really not that niche - many Docker images are based on it, postmarketOS is based on it.
Also OpenBSD is not a distro, it’s a completely different OS.
What is the “real” purpose of Debian or Arch?
I should have been more clear -- Debian/Arch "just works" and (both low/mid/high users) do not need of anything beyond that. And both Alpine/OpenBSD do not provide an extra "need" to anything of what both Debian/Arch already does. Unless if Alpine and/or OpenBSD provides a feature that makes Arch/Debian obsolete in any way.... then yep, both will become more relevant.
Judging by various posts I’ve seen Arch and Debian both don’t “just work” for many users.
Also I really don’t get your point about providing a feature to make others “obsolete”… what do popular distros like Manjaro or Mint provide that make Arch/Ubuntu obsolete? And at least Manjaro has managed to be in the news quite a few times unfortunately.
The point of the article is that Alpine works, both on a technical level and as a project, without unnecessary drama.
I’d (mostly) say the same about OpenBSD too, btw.
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