Alpine’s use of musl means only the truly insane would be leaping to its defense. The inability to support DNS over TCP was a problem for years. Outside of that, so many things presuppose glibc. It’s an endless source of weird.<p>It doesn’t make the news cause it’s a hobby os that was made important when we decided the size of the container mattered most.
As a long time Alpine user (bare metal, laptop, pi, servers) I can praise the low memory footprint, simple and consistent configuration and up-to-date packages.<p>Alpine runs great on older hardware. Things that bugged me over the years are the lack of armv5 support (understandably an architecture that is dying) and that their native firewall awall is somewhat limited. Despite being a pleasure to use awall with iptables, it is not capable of nftables exclusive features (eg cake) as far as I understand, yet.<p>The lack of obscure packages in Alpines repositories is not really an issue in my scenario. Or compiling against musl. Neither is the mentioned DNS over TCP issue.<p>Using wlroots and sway is a breeze on Alpine and having moved from gentoo > arch > alpine over the years, I am glad Alpine exists. Second choice for me is Void Linux musl and their optional armv5 support via xbps-src.<p>I hope Alpine will stick around and is not only known to be slim in docker containers.
We love Alpine because `/` is a tmpfs. Your packages and other modifications are all reinstalled from scratch each boot. This gives such a clean install compared to most other distributions that it's not even funny, it's just sad.<p>We're not particularly interested in NixOS or Guix but we really really want to find a glibc-based distribution that works this way, because Alpine's musl is terrible for desktop use, but the package management is just so amazingly simple and beautiful on a daily driver.<p>-Emily (see HN profile for details)
<a href="https://www.zdnet.com/article/chainguard-releases-wolfi-a-linux-undistribution/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.zdnet.com/article/chainguard-releases-wolfi-a-li...</a><p><i>> To make this new Linux variant, Lorenc said, "We hired a bunch of the original Alpine team. But, Alpine was never designed for containers. It was originally designed for routers, firmware, and that kind of thing. What made it attractive for containers was its size and security." Wolfi takes that minimal approach to an extreme for the sake of security.</i>
I’ve run into way too many issues with musl to consider it for anything serious. For containers I use debian-slim and it’s great (of course, it’s Debian after all).
I'm not complaining, but am a bit surprised to hear Drew's praises. Isn't Alpine, by using BSD-licensed muslc instead of glibc, OpenRC instead of Linux-only systemd, and by its overall business-friendly focus on containers enabling distribution free of GPL restrictions conflicting with Drew's FSF and GNU engagement?
I long for a news article/PSA explaining how name resolution differs with musl compared to glibc<p>This one characteristic has made me a hero, over and over, and I'm honestly tired of it.<p>I'd think twice before using it. What you hope to gain and how else they may be achieved. Registry caches are easy to deploy and don't get enough love.<p>Any sufficiently complex service will find oddities, and you might need some graybeard wizard to sort it out.
Have had so many issues related to DNS Lookup failures with container images on Alpine that I honestly can’t be bothered to deal with it anymore. If such basic stuff isn’t reliable then why should I consider it for production usage?<p>I stick to using Ubuntu minimal container images. They’re 30MB (compressed) in size so it’s never a problem around container bloat.
I've been migrating to nixos. I think it makes news in that everyone is obligated to hate it publicly for at least 6 months before resigning themselves to it.
>It has been a boring experience. The system is simply reliable, and the upgrades go over without issue every other quarter,<p>>Or more frequently on edge, which I run on my workstation and laptops<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36407275">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36407275</a><p>(tl;dr Alpine Edge is stable in some situations and unstable in others. User discretion is advised.)
The first time I hit bugs trying to run a JRE on Alpine because of musl, I threw it away and never looked back. I understand there are musl builds of Java these days but I don't care, the whole thing is just an unnecessary headache.
Has anyone here successfully ran Alpine on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W? I'm asking because despite my numerous attempts it amounted to a failure in using the WiFi and I haven't seen anyone doing so successfully yet.
wait you can actually use alpine in a workstation? I thought it was just for containers<p>*cue to angry linux mob attacking me<p>Although I do have to say that almost all downsides of alpine are not really relevant in the context of containers