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Alpine Linux: Brilliant Linux Distro

wiki.alpinelinux.org

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Re: Alpine Linux: Brilliant Linux Distro

#61

Post by DiabloD3 »

Macha wrote: post #39

> Keep in mind that today due to the great popularity of Docker, Alpine Linux is one of the most deployed operating systems currently in use, because within every other operating system that uses docker, the docker image it uses is almost always Alpine Linux. Isn't this a little overstated? I'm willing to accept it has a majority, especially once you get into custom images, but e.g. docker's library images are usuall…

Docker images used to be entirely Debian-based but have slowly become almost entirely Alpine based. A lot of Debian users have become Alpine users, and I've been mulling over if I should join as well (since I've used Debian for 20+ years but are friends with Alpine devs and users).

Re: Alpine Linux: Brilliant Linux Distro

#62

Post by michaeldwan »

I really want to like Alpine, but we (Fly.io) have seen so many DNS issues with customer images that we’re now recommending Ubuntu or Debian slim. The extra ~50mb is a worthwhile trade off to avoid hard to debug musl-libc issues.

eg https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/musl-libc-alpines-greatest-we...

Re: Alpine Linux: Brilliant Linux Distro

#63

Post by pid-1 »

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?

"I can't find $SOFTWARE in $PACKAGE_MANAGER now I have to compile it from source and my life sucks" has happened with me way more times with Alpine than Debian.

Re: Alpine Linux: Brilliant Linux Distro

#64

Post by boondaburrah »

djbusby wrote: post #20
moltke wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ;)

I got hazed by an upperclassmen with gentoo around that time and it's ruined me ever since. It's just not Linux if I can't edit a text file and rebuild the world.

Re: Alpine Linux: Brilliant Linux Distro

#65

Post by selcuka »

ethanpil wrote: post #58
andai wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

There is a ~29MB Debian Docker image:

https://hub.docker.com/layers/debian/library/debian/stable-s...

Re: Alpine Linux: Brilliant Linux Distro

#66

Post by marcan_42 »

stabbles wrote: post #30
laurencerowe wrote: post #23

Doesn't Alpine have a noticeable performance penalty due to being based on musl libc instead of glibc? This seems to be born out in multiple people's micro benchmarks though how much of an issue it is for larger applications probably depends on the workload. https://superuser.com/questions/1219609/why-is-the-alpine-do... https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/benchmarking-debian-vs-alpine...

I've tried alpine's gcc before and it was about 50% slower to compile a bunch of packages. That said, if you compile llvm with MinSize/-Os on glibc distro's it runs 50% slower too, so it's unclear if slowdown is due to musl libc or rather that they optimize for size instead of performance.

Compiling is CPU-bound and doesn't really bottleneck on anything that libc is involved with other than the allocator, so unless musl's allocator is comically slower than glib's, chances are it's just -Os.

Re: Alpine Linux: Brilliant Linux Distro

#67

Post by boondaburrah »

tus666 wrote: post #38

Worrying about linux distros seems so antiquated in this serverless cloud computing world. Or at least so last decade.

You say that but there's other reasons to use linux (on the desktop!), and serverless itself is an old concept in which I never used to care which flavour of unix/linux my host was running my php or cgi scripts on.

Re: Alpine Linux: Brilliant Linux Distro

#68

Post by kobalsky »

lmarcos wrote: post #25

What are the chances of encountering performance issues and/or incompatibilities when using Alpine Linux as Docker image for Go apps in production?

Aren't go apps statically linked? You could theoretically build it and put the binary on a "FROM scratch" docker and run it.

I mean, what I'm trying to say is that the base image doesn't matter, it would be basically just a debugging environment for you to exec into.

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