Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Alpine Linux: Brilliant Linux Distro

wiki.alpinelinux.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 98 posts

Re: Alpine Linux: Brilliant Linux Distro

#11

Post by lastdong »

synergy20 wrote: post #4
lastdong wrote: post #2

It’s used to build pretty much every Docker image around us. Works extremely well as WSL. Super lightweight, performant, and the number of packages is growing strong. Pair it with xcfe (or gnome or kde) and you have a super desktop, no more worries about RAM or background processes eating up CPU (looking at you Windows). Yes, there’s a Blender package! and many other good stuff. Alpine made Linux fresh again, and yes…

depends on what you do, it's musl-based, some glibc software might not run well, and if you use linux for daily development work, it might not fit.

I usually (mostly) use containers for dev, and deployment, which abstracts things a bit

Re: Alpine Linux: Brilliant Linux Distro

#12

Post by uzername »

We use alpine based images extensively where possible. Most popular language ecosystems and tools have an alpine option. Alpine as a base image is nice because it's nearly blank, but easy to customize unlike distroless. Recently one tool did drop Alpine, most based on it's reduced performance, and that was envoyproxy.

Re: Alpine Linux: Brilliant Linux Distro

#13

Post by pid-1 »

uzername wrote: post #12

We use alpine based images extensively where possible. Most popular language ecosystems and tools have an alpine option. Alpine as a base image is nice because it's nearly blank, but easy to customize unlike distroless. Recently one tool did drop Alpine, most based on it's reduced performance, and that was envoyproxy.

That used to be huge a few years ago.

But with both Ubuntu and Debian shipping much smaller images, I almost always find the hassle of using Alpine not worth it.

Re: Alpine Linux: Brilliant Linux Distro

#14

Post by imachine1980_ »

SahAssar wrote: post #6
lastdong wrote: post #2

It’s used to build pretty much every Docker image around us. Works extremely well as WSL. Super lightweight, performant, and the number of packages is growing strong. Pair it with xcfe (or gnome or kde) and you have a super desktop, no more worries about RAM or background processes eating up CPU (looking at you Windows). Yes, there’s a Blender package! and many other good stuff. Alpine made Linux fresh again, and yes…

> performant Isn't musl generally less performant than glibc?

I think busybox is lighter, maybe not faster, but make alpine probably the cleanest modern distro, make it efficient and fast in the process.

Re: Alpine Linux: Brilliant Linux Distro

#15

Post by Tenoke »

>due to the great popularity of Docker, Alpine Linux is one of the most deployed operating systems currently in use

Wow, that's impressive! However, when I check on Distrowatch it's only in the 30s. Is there a better statistic? Something more representative of actual amounts of installs on anything at all?

Re: Alpine Linux: Brilliant Linux Distro

#16

Post by Tenoke »

pid-1 wrote: post #13
uzername wrote: post #12

We use alpine based images extensively where possible. Most popular language ecosystems and tools have an alpine option. Alpine as a base image is nice because it's nearly blank, but easy to customize unlike distroless. Recently one tool did drop Alpine, most based on it's reduced performance, and that was envoyproxy.

That used to be huge a few years ago. But with both Ubuntu and Debian shipping much smaller images, I almost always find the hassle of using Alpine not worth it.

Same currently. Unless I'm just modifying a simple trusted image (which does happen often enough) I just start from Ubuntu during development and only attempt to move the image to Alpine if I'm really trying to improve resource usage down the line.

Re: Alpine Linux: Brilliant Linux Distro

#17

Post by silisili »

Tenoke wrote: post #15

>due to the great popularity of Docker, Alpine Linux is one of the most deployed operating systems currently in use Wow, that's impressive! However, when I check on Distrowatch it's only in the 30s. Is there a better statistic? Something more representative of actual amounts of installs on anything at all?

I've been down this path before and I can say for sure two things -

1 - Distrowatch stats are both gamed and useless

2 - There's no easy way to see which distro is most popular on the whole.

Re: Alpine Linux: Brilliant Linux Distro

#19

Post by yumiris »

Tenoke wrote: post #15

>due to the great popularity of Docker, Alpine Linux is one of the most deployed operating systems currently in use Wow, that's impressive! However, when I check on Distrowatch it's only in the 30s. Is there a better statistic? Something more representative of actual amounts of installs on anything at all?

DistroWatch counts by clicks to the distro's page from what I remember. Its statistics represent the "interest", rather than install count.

With regard to Alpine Linux on Docker, the install count[0] of the base image should give an idea (over 1 billion!).

[0] https://hub.docker.com/_/alpine

Edit: clarity

Re: Alpine Linux: Brilliant Linux Distro

#20

Post by djbusby »

moltke wrote: post #10
bcl wrote: post #5

WARNING: Blatant self promotion follows :) I've recently switched to using Alpine on my laptop, and have written a bit about setting it up using ansible here: https://www.brianlane.com/post/alpine-laptop/ And when you can't find the apps you need in the distribution there's always podman: https://www.brianlane.com/post/prusa-slicer/

I ran Alpine on my laptop during the last half of college. It's a great little distro if you don't mind occasionally compiling things.

I've been on Gentoo since 2005. It's a great distro if don't mind compiling everything ;)
Post reply on HN