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Alpine Linux 3.13

alpinelinux.org

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Re: Alpine Linux 3.13

#2
I want to like Alpine because it's so light, but realistically you can only ever use it in Docker / VMs or for very specific locked-down needs.

The musl libc makes it a bad choice for general purpose desktop use (look at the number of hacks required to get some version of VSCode running on it for example).

Re: Alpine Linux 3.13

#3
post #2

I want to like Alpine because it's so light, but realistically you can only ever use it in Docker / VMs or for very specific locked-down needs. The musl libc makes it a bad choice for general purpose desktop use (look at the number of hacks required to get some version of VSCode running on it for example).

You can install Alpine on the host and then use Alpine images in Docker on Alpine. :D (that's how I do it)

But yeah I would like to use it on the desktop as well..

Re: Alpine Linux 3.13

#4
post #2

I want to like Alpine because it's so light, but realistically you can only ever use it in Docker / VMs or for very specific locked-down needs. The musl libc makes it a bad choice for general purpose desktop use (look at the number of hacks required to get some version of VSCode running on it for example).

The gcompat project, which provides a wine-like compatibility layer for glibc applications, is pretty close to having vscode working out of the box.

Re: Alpine Linux 3.13

#5
post #2

I want to like Alpine because it's so light, but realistically you can only ever use it in Docker / VMs or for very specific locked-down needs. The musl libc makes it a bad choice for general purpose desktop use (look at the number of hacks required to get some version of VSCode running on it for example).

On the contrary, we ship Alpine with iSH because it’s so small by default. This keeps our app size down to just a few MB-which is not bad, IMO, for something that gives you most of POSIX on your iPhone :)

Re: Alpine Linux 3.13

#7
I would love for Alpine to progress to the point where it's a realistic desktop or server OS, rather than the OS for the containers that run on an Ubuntu or Debian server.

Edit: Just got inspired and went to the contributing page.

Think I'll start using it to develop with Vim in a VM locally and see where things go from there.

Re: Alpine Linux 3.13

#8
post #7

I would love for Alpine to progress to the point where it's a realistic desktop or server OS, rather than the OS for the containers that run on an Ubuntu or Debian server. Edit: Just got inspired and went to the contributing page. Think I'll start using it to develop with Vim in a VM locally and see where things go from there.

I had to install glibc last time I tried Alpine as desktop distribution, so

Re: Alpine Linux 3.13

#9
Another "I want to love Alpine but can't" user here.

Their use of musl libc makes it a very poor choice for running python in a container, because it forces a lot of manual rebuilding since the PyPi wheels don't work on Alpine, among other issues [1]

[1] https://pythonspeed.com/articles/alpine-docker-python/

Re: Alpine Linux 3.13

#10
post #2

I want to like Alpine because it's so light, but realistically you can only ever use it in Docker / VMs or for very specific locked-down needs. The musl libc makes it a bad choice for general purpose desktop use (look at the number of hacks required to get some version of VSCode running on it for example).

I think it totally makes sense that a minimal distro optimized for containers should be a different project from a minimal distro optimized for desktop use.

Off the top of my head, Tiny Core Linux uses glibc and has desktop users as a primary goal.

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