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Alpine Linux 3.8.0 released
- jbergstroem 8y agoNote: doesn't seem to be available on docker hub as of yet.
- andyonthewings 8y agoIt has been worked on in the Alpine image repo: https://github.com/gliderlabs/docker-alpine/commits/master https://github.com/gliderlabs/docker-alpine/commits/master The submission of it to the official images repo: https://github.com/docker-library/official-images/pull/4501 https://github.com/docker-library/official-images/pull/4501
- api 8y agoI love Alpine. Its Linux without the bloat and systemd cancer.
- digi_owl 8y agoAnd on that note it was booted off the front page within 5 hours of being posted...
- djsumdog 8y agosystemd has made packaging easier, and it's good at full process management, but still, it is nice to have alternatives in major distros. Even though I'm a Gentoo user, I still prefer void's runit or openbsd's rc.d system when it comes to simplicity, over OpenRC. Also, dinit looks really promising as well: https://davmac.wordpress.com/category/dinit/ https://davmac.wordpress.com/category/dinit/
- amanzi 8y agoI don't have enough long-term Linux experience to understand why systemd is so hated... All of my recent experience has been with Debian Stretch which I think uses systemd by default, and I don't see any obvious issues with it.
- _emacsomancer_ 8y agosystemd is fine until it isn't. On my systems with systemd inits, whenever there's a problem, systemd is always involved somehow. [I had a cute one where a daemon (emacs, actually) set to start-up on boot with systemd ended up failing, which somehow caused the rest of the systemd modules to fail, with all of the modules failing silently (so the systemd tools themselves didn't tell me anything about failed units).]
- api 8y agoThe original SystemV init was ugly and hairy. Systemd managed to replace it with something more counter-intuitive and obtuse. That took effort. "systemctl list-units" What's wrong with? "systemctl list" or "systemctl units" or "systemctl ls" ? Then there's the output, which is borderline unreadable. The entire systemd design is like this. It seems like it's designed by people who enjoy arcane hard to read and hard to type stuff. I can never, ever remember the magic incantations required to get it to load a new unit file. I can also never recall where they go without Googling and it seems to vary across distributions. People always joke that the first step to doing anything with git is to Google it. Systemd is worse since its commands are bizarre and non-memorable. Over the years I've grown to hate intentionally arcane software. It wastes your time to no benefit. I tolerate git because it's powerful and it does have rational reasons for how it does things, but systemd is just annoying.
- fulafel 8y agoI think "systemd came and replaced sysvinit" is a winner-written history. There are/were other strong alternatives to sysvinit and eg in Debian it was a close race.
- JdeBP 8y agoIt's one of the fallacies called out by the Uselessd Guy. * http://uselessd.darknedgy.net/ProSystemdAntiSystemd/ http://uselessd.darknedgy.net/ProSystemdAntiSystemd/ It's also an outright ahistorical falsehood in the case of Fedora and Ubuntu.
- 8y ago
- djsumdog 8y agoI would really love to see Alpine as a default image on hosting providers like Digital Ocean and Vultr. A lot of people use it as a base for docker containers, but I think it'd also be great to use it as a lightweight docker host for running containers.
- iamdeedubs 8y agoI'm working on this very thing. Albeit only on AWS currently https://github.com/massivekube/massivekube https://github.com/massivekube/massivekube Edit: Forgot url -_-
- jtl999 8y agoI deployed my own Alpine Linux image on GCE that included preconfigured nginx+mariadb+zabbix for monitoring my various services. Works well.
- nbabitskiy 8y agoThere is an Alpine image on Vultr, it's the first option if you click on ISO library.
- artellectual 8y agoI personally love alpine, I’ve been exploring it outside of docker and has proven to be a great canvas for deploying apps. Hope to see more cloud providers support alpine as an option.
- DeepYogurt 8y agoWhat makes it more appealing than say arch, gentoo, debian, etc...?
- petre 8y agoLightweight, simple, no systemd, quite a big selection of up to date packages, like Arch.
- artellectual 8y agoYeah pretty much. What he said, up-to-date packages mean I don’t need to build my own ruby / elixir / python / node, I just reference them when building my application package, and it’s done. The way I’m using it now is I just build alpine packages and host a private repository. When I get a fresh alpine install I install my package and I’m done.
- erichurkman 8y agoFor me it's that the things I install are deliberate. I have to opt into installing every extra package, so I am more thoughtful in expanding the base image. I liken it more to my fond days with FreeBSD and OpenBSD. A narrowly scoped base image and userland, but easy access to a vast array of packages/ports, but each explicitly listed and installed. It's "batteries included" but "pick your batteries" vs "here's a kitchen sink full of batteries."
- dharmab 8y agoRunning applications on Alpine feels like very deliberately building an environment, whether inside a container or directly on a host. (Just be aware of the differences between glibc and musl... DNS resolution in particular will bite you if you don't understand the implementation)
- elipsey 8y agoI'm a bit hazy on the practical difference between PIC/PIE and ASLR binaries, in terms of both security and what is required to build. Would anyone care to remark on this?
- viraptor 8y agoWhether you can get ASLR depends on the system. Whether your app can be randomised in load depends on if it (and libraries) have been compiled with PIC. Whether you're main binary address gets randomised depends on PIE.
- fao_ 8y agoI've been using Alpine recently on my X200, and while it does require an arch linux chroot for some applications (due to some slight musllibc/gnulibc interop problems), overall it's one of the most pleasant, and stable distributions I've ever worked with. As a regular user of systemd (I use arch linux as my main and therefore was one of the first adopters of systemd) I am subjected to irregular and weird irreplicable bootup bugs and timing problems. Alpine reminds me of a simpler time when my computer's bootup was deterministic, and a hang at boot was only ever caused by a disk problem, rather than something trivial like having to wait 3 minutes because it can't connect to the network. I totally understand the reason for there to be 'bloat' in projects like systemd, GNU libc, etc. And I understand that often that bloat is needed, to cover the edge cases in the thousands of use cases for which they are deployed. However, it's only really when I moved to Alpine that I understood just how much of it there was, and how much of an impact it had on not only my interactions with the computer, but other concerns like my energy usage, etc. It was a like a breath of fresh air for me, and it reminded me that computing could be good, again.
- ksec 8y ago.Alpine Linux is a security-oriented, lightweight Linux distribution based on musl libc and busybox. .End of support for hardened kernel (unofficial Grsecurity) doesn't that contradict?
- viraptor 8y agoNo. With updated licensing, there are no big distros supporting grsec anymore. You pretty much have to pay now. (And there's more to security than grsec)
- swiley 8y agoThe hardened kernel was more or less unusable on the desktop anyway. There was quite a bit of software that’s just completely incompatible with it. It’s still better than selinux though haha.
- digi_owl 8y agoIn large part because grsec would opt to break backwards compatibility whenever it had to be weighed against further hardening.
- dharmab 8y agoIn addition to licensing issues, Grsecurity's patches have been described by Linus as "garbage" (in terms of code quality).
- digi_owl 8y agoThey also invariably opted towards security when there was a trade-off between security and backwards compatibility, a big red flag when trying to get anything past Torvalds.
- efiecho 8y agoI have used Alpine Linux for a long time even before they switched to musl libc, and I really liked it. However, I have now stopped using it because of the situation with security updates. Very often critical security issues will not be patched for weeks and desktop software like Firefox can go months without being updated. I would really love to use Alpine Linux again for my servers and desktops if the situation improves, but now it's simply too dangerous to depend on it.
- _emacsomancer_ 8y agoYou might check out Void Linux (just in case you haven't already): they have a musl variant and it's more desktop-oriented than Alpine.
- efiecho 8y agoI actually switched to Void Linux after having used Debian on the desktops for some time last year and I will say it's a near perfect Linux distro.
- craftyguy 8y agoThey seem to be understaffed, and would probably benefit from having additional maintainers.. You could always volunteer.
- efiecho 8y agoYes this is probably the problem, and I think the maintainers do everything they can. I was not writing the post to criticise Alpine as I really like it, but people need to take the missing security updates into consideration before they start to depend on Alpine for important things.
- techntoke 8y agoArch is another good option to consider that receives frequent updates. However, Alpine package contribution isn't that challenging; but I'd like to see more CI integrations to automate the heck out of package updates.
- interfixus 8y agoClean, tight, sensible distro, the way the world ought to be. All my stuff on the web runs on Alpine. Images are tiny and easily manages. I use no Docker at all.
- marenkay 8y agoWhile I love using Alpine Linux, it would be awesome if Alpine made options for contributing a bit more visible/approachable.