6 ms·
Alpine Linux 3.13
- gigel82 6y agoI want to like Alpine because it's so light, but realistically you can only ever use it in Docker / VMs or for very specific locked-down needs. The musl libc makes it a bad choice for general purpose desktop use (look at the number of hacks required to get some version of VSCode running on it for example).
- saagarjha 6y agoOn the contrary, we ship Alpine with iSH because it’s so small by default. This keeps our app size down to just a few MB-which is not bad, IMO, for something that gives you most of POSIX on your iPhone :)
- jlelse 6y agoYou can install Alpine on the host and then use Alpine images in Docker on Alpine. :D (that's how I do it) But yeah I would like to use it on the desktop as well..
- nenolod 6y agoThe gcompat project, which provides a wine-like compatibility layer for glibc applications, is pretty close to having vscode working out of the box.
- vinniec 6y agoAfter this message from you, I proceeded to update alpine to have a more recent version of gcompat available and to try to start some programs compiled with glibc. I haven't tried many things, but all the tests failed except with "powder" ( http://www.zincland.com/powder/release/powder118_linux.tar.gz http://www.zincland.com/powder/release/powder118_linux.tar.g... ) which actually starts after installing the gcompat package. The thing is very interesting because actually I would like to try to use vscode on alpine, I wanted to try the "appimage" version (https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/releases/download/1.52.1/VSCodium-1.52.1-1608165473 https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/releases/download/1.52..... glibc2.16-x86_64.AppImage) but I could not start any appimage in my tests. If you have more information, I'm curious, even if I'm quite noob.
- piaste 6y agoI think it totally makes sense that a minimal distro optimized for containers should be a different project from a minimal distro optimized for desktop use. Off the top of my head, Tiny Core Linux uses glibc and has desktop users as a primary goal.
- turminal 6y agoVScode as a piece of software is profoundly incompatible with the philosophy of Alpine so this isn't too surprising.
- fmajid 6y agoI run Alpine on bare metal as my home server, very happy with it. I do run Ubuntu on my laptop/desktop.
- akvadrako 6y agomusl is also sometimes much slower than glib, for example with some scripting languages. Even when your workload is compatible it's usually a good idea to use another distro in your docker container. When performance doesn't matter I think it's great though.
- nenolod 6y agoWe have started to extend musl with optimized routines like glibc does. But really, the performance difference is usually minimal.
- ddevault 6y agoI use Alpine as my daily driver on desktops, and in production on bare metal servers (and in production VMs). musl libc is much easier to debug and understand, which pays off in spades regardless of compatibility with broken (i.e. non-portable) programs. The system is exceptionally stable and reliable, which I care about very much. It's also simple, in that it does everything I ask it to, and nothing I don't ask it to. I can fit the entire system in my head. I use Vim as my editor, and yes, programmers who value bloated, un-Unixy tools like VSCode will not find the system accomodating.
- arghwhat 6y agoAlpine works quite well as a desktop OS. Using pre-built proprietary applications is the only thing that requires a little trickery. I imagine vscode could be built and packaged just fine if someone wanted to.
- alpaca128 6y agoFor me the best alternative is Void Linux. It is still very lightweight and without unnecessary clutter, but more pleasant to use on a desktop.
- stock_toaster 6y agoAlpine is great as a docker _host_ too.
- tester756 6y agoWho stays behind Alpine?
- skrtskrt 6y agoI would love for Alpine to progress to the point where it's a realistic desktop or server OS, rather than the OS for the containers that run on an Ubuntu or Debian server. Edit: Just got inspired and went to the contributing page. Think I'll start using it to develop with Vim in a VM locally and see where things go from there.
- numpad0 6y agoI had to install glibc last time I tried Alpine as desktop distribution, so
- nenolod 6y agoWhat is it missing that makes you feel it is unrealistic?
- skrtskrt 6y agoI am thinking more about adoption - and things that come with adoption - than functionality. It's not an option for which OS to flash onto my DigitalOcean VM. Getting it going on Raspberry Pi is largely undocumented. For desktop, it doesn't (officially) support many window managers or desktops.
- nenolod 6y agoOn desktop, we support KDE, GNOME and Xfce, which are the big ones, but yes, we could use more work there. It is hoped that the cloud images project will get Alpine available in all of the main platforms, we've done AWS already starting with 3.13.
- hn_acc_2 6y agoAnother "I want to love Alpine but can't" user here. Their use of musl libc makes it a very poor choice for running python in a container, because it forces a lot of manual rebuilding since the PyPi wheels don't work on Alpine, among other issues [1] [1] https://pythonspeed.com/articles/alpine-docker-python/ https://pythonspeed.com/articles/alpine-docker-python/
- chrisjc 6y agoOut of curiosity, which container have you settled on instead? debian:buster-slim?
- hn_acc_2 6y agoI did settle on Debian, using i.e. python:3.9-slim-buster (though you can just as easily start from debian and install your python version)
- DiabloD3 6y agoSo just use the glibc compat layer, or also install glibc. https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Running_glibc_programs https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Running_glibc_programs
- nenolod 6y agothis page really should be updated, at this point all you basically have to do is `apk add gcompat`.
- hn_acc_2 6y agoIf you ask me, installing glibc / compat layers defeats the purpose of using Alpine, especially since Alpine ultimately only saved me ~50 MB on image size versus a similarly configured debian:slim-buster image
- ossusermivami 6y agoI use UBI minimal docker image from redhat which is based on RHEL but free from license : https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/8/html-single/building_running_and_managing_containers/index?extIdCarryOver=true&sc_cid=701f2000000tyBjAAI#using_minimal_red_hat_base_images https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterp... Pretty small and has most of the things i need : Minimal images are about 92M on disk and 32M compressed. This makes it less than half the size of the standard images.
- pythonist 6y agoGiven the popularity of Alpine it is important to update images as soon as possible given how many significant updates are there. Services like [1] help a lot for that... [1] https://newreleases.io https://newreleases.io
- prepperdev 6y agoRecently, I migrated my personal dev laptop from Ubuntu to Alpine Linux. It took a day, but everything works now, including hidpi stuff. No big issues so far and I am in the process of migrating my home server to Alpine.
- thedanbob 6y agoJust a heads up to anyone using wireguard on Alpine: wireguard is now included in the kernel, so you'll want to uninstall the wireguard-lts package when you update to 3.13. Otherwise your kernel won't be upgraded and any other packages with modules (e.g. zfs) will break.
- stock_toaster 6y agothanks!