I would like to see a glibc version of Alpine.<p>My favorite feature (the killer feature) of Alpine is that rootfs is not persistent. Persistent storage actually only contains the base system itself and each package you install. On startup, the system is loaded into a tmpfs and all your packages are loaded on top of it. I've successfully created a desktop install using this method, it boots off a USB stick and the only persistent partition is /home. I find the cleanliness of this extremely impressive.<p>IIRC, it only works this way if you don't use the official installer, which wants to make a persistent rootfs. I feel like Alpine has shown me "true level" [0] and I feel dirty using any distro with a persistent rootfs... in fact it's the single largest reason why I haven't felt motivated to try Linux in a while (aside from KISS since it was interesting enough).<p>There are no other distros like this, so the fact that it uses musl is a little disappointing if I want to use it as a desktop (which I know it's not designed for).<p>NixOS comes close, but is fully declarative and I don't really want to learn a new DSL today. I should probably just settle and go with Arch or something.<p>[0]: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1zBtJhgwBI" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1zBtJhgwBI</a>
As someone that uses Alpine on literally everything except for a desktop I think this is great and would love to see it contributed upstream and integrated by the Alpine developers to be a fully supported installer option.
Great article!<p>You know, I would love to see an "Alpnix" in the future -- all of Alpine's speed and lightness, all of NixOS's hermetic and reproducible build capabilities...
Is there a distribution of Alpine Linux under 50MB (terminal only), iso or raw image, with APK intalled? Every minimal Linux installer brings Busybox without a proper package manager.