Alpine Linux 3.15
alpinelinux.org
Alpine Linux 3.15
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Re: Alpine Linux 3.15
#2I'm familiar with Alpine in container scenarios, but is there any mileage to using it as a day-to-day desktop distro?
Re: Alpine Linux 3.15
#3I'm familiar with Alpine in container scenarios, but is there any mileage to using it as a day-to-day desktop distro?
Not really. It's not designed for that. It's designed to be as lightweight as possible.
also, instead of Glibc, it uses musl, which although is supposed to be binary-compatible, does have some gotchas, so the larger the system, with more apps and libraries running on it expecting glibc, will have issues.
Re: Alpine Linux 3.15
#4I'm familiar with Alpine in container scenarios, but is there any mileage to using it as a day-to-day desktop distro?
I use it as a bare metal OS on my blog server and it's great in that scenario too. I've personally found the libc stuff makes it really inconvenient to use as a desktop OS, unfortunately. You have to jump through hoops to get something like VSCode to "just work".
Re: Alpine Linux 3.15
#5I'm familiar with Alpine in container scenarios, but is there any mileage to using it as a day-to-day desktop distro?
I use it as my primary OS. You have to do more setup work, there’s much less documentation/help online than more popular distros, and running proprietary software (which usually links to glibc) is probably not worth the effort. This is mostly fine for me, as I don’t do much on my computer aside from code and use a web browser — the only difficulty is most streaming video unfortunately requires Widevine. Given those limitations, I’m very happy with it: it’s very simple and I have a much better understanding of what is installed/running and why.
Re: Alpine Linux 3.15
#6I'm familiar with Alpine in container scenarios, but is there any mileage to using it as a day-to-day desktop distro?
postmarketOS is based on it. I tried it on my PinePhone, it works, but in the end I went with Arch Linux ARM.
Re: Alpine Linux 3.15
#7Is Python totally DIY? Can't find it in the package search.
Re: Alpine Linux 3.15
#8I'm familiar with Alpine in container scenarios, but is there any mileage to using it as a day-to-day desktop distro?
I use it as a daily driver on my Raspberry Pi. Since the community is small the package repositories are a bit small as well, and I occasionally have to build stuff by hand (painful on the Pi). Add musl to the ARM platform and most binaries in the wild won't run. However, musl and apk means the Alpine is a lot faster than, say, Raspbian or Arch.
Re: Alpine Linux 3.15
#9I'm familiar with Alpine in container scenarios, but is there any mileage to using it as a day-to-day desktop distro?
I use it as my primary OS. You have to do more setup work, there’s much less documentation/help online than more popular distros, and running proprietary software (which usually links to glibc) is probably not worth the effort. This is mostly fine for me, as I don’t do much on my computer aside from code and use a web browser — the only difficulty is most streaming video unfortunately requires Widevine. Given those l…
Yeah, coding (in terminal windows only) and Web browser is what I'm thinking of using it for. I might just have to plunge in and give it a go, thanks! :)
Re: Alpine Linux 3.15
#10Is Python totally DIY? Can't find it in the package search.
Try 'python3' or 'python2'.