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Alpine Linux: Brilliant Linux Distro

wiki.alpinelinux.org

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Re: Alpine Linux: Brilliant Linux Distro

#51

Post by mkdirp »

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/

Instead of using podman directly, and potentially messing with X11 permissions, you could use x11docker (despite the name, it podman support). It attempts to safely share X11 into a container.

Re: Alpine Linux: Brilliant Linux Distro

#52

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Alpine Linux: Brilliant Linux Distro

#53

Post by systems_glitch »

Started using Alpine as a curiosity for embedded/high security development a while ago, probably 2011-2012. I've of course used it a fair bit in $day_job containerization of services. Nowadays personally I find myself using it for the bare metal OS on servers running minimal services: things like VM hosts, purpose-built fileservers, etc.

It's a fine distro, you can typically go a good bit of time between updates without worrying about fragging your install, which is especially important to me on personal projects, which are often more like pets than livestock :P

Re: Alpine Linux: Brilliant Linux Distro

#55

Post by yukinon »

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.

I've used Alpine pretty heavily but did not run into any hassle aside from "oh yeah forgot to install this package".

Could you go into more detail about the challenges one could encounter when using Alpine?

Re: Alpine Linux: Brilliant Linux Distro

#56

Post by sgarland »

bbotond wrote: post #54
mountainriver wrote: post #50

Alpine was the first of its kind but there are better minimal distributions now. I’d rather not tip toe around the oddities that alpine introduces and just use a Debian based image.

What are those better distros and why are they better?

debian-slim and its downstream, because fighting with musl libc isn't worth the time.

Re: Alpine Linux: Brilliant Linux Distro

#57

Post by mindwok »

yukinon wrote: post #55
pid-1 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've used Alpine pretty heavily but did not run into any hassle aside from "oh yeah forgot to install this package". Could you go into more detail about the challenges one could encounter when using Alpine?

Alpine uses a different C standard library called musl compared to most well known distros that use glibc. You can run into issues if the application makes use of functions in glibc that musl has not implemented. Usually you run into them in applications that are written in C, such as in some Python modules that utilise C under the hood or in databases etc.

Re: Alpine Linux: Brilliant Linux Distro

#58

Post by ethanpil »

andai wrote: post #24
pid-1 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

TIL there is a 29MB Minimal Ubuntu! https://ubuntu.com/blog/minimal-ubuntu-released

Wow, wish there was a Debian version!. I miss JeOS!

Re: Alpine Linux: Brilliant Linux Distro

#59

Post by gurjeet »

sgarland wrote: post #56
bbotond wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are those better distros and why are they better?

debian-slim and its downstream, because fighting with musl libc isn't worth the time.

I'm working on a personal project where musl is the foundation of my project. So I'm interested in learning about all the downsides, corner cases, and footguns of using musl. Can you please share some pointers (search phrases, mailing list/forum posts, etc.) for me to read more.
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