5 ms·

I really like Alpine, even as a desktop OS. musl is a downside but I guess flatpaks and whatnot help that

squarefoot 4y ago
What problems did you encounter? I installed Alpine on some laptops for desktop use and never had a problem except with one HP small netbook where the energy management seems broken as the kernel rewrites somewhere the screen backlight value with a value of 4 (= almost invisible) as soon as I pull the DC plug but doesn't update it when I plug it back. This also happens with ACPI and all power management uninstalled, so I sorta solved this by installing ACPI and making scripts to echo the right value back. This problem aside, I could install a lot of non trivial things, including for example WINE and Yabridge to use music plugins. Unless the system pulled them unbeknownst to me, I made no use of flatpaks and the like. The more I use Alpine, the more I like it.
- LoganDark 4y ago
  > What problems did you encounter? I personally found it difficult to get Nvidia drivers & Steam working. The latter worked with flatpaks, but Nvidia is always annoying. Yes. You may laugh at me for trying to use Linux on a computer that was not built for it.
  - squarefoot 4y ago
    One of my favorite quotes, no idea about the author or the date, is "discoveries are made by not following instructions". Laughing because you're trying to get more from a machine that is built to give less would be really stupid; that is actually clever and admirable, and when one succeeds it gives extreme satisfaction. As for Nvidia drivers I can't help because my last experience with their cards is quite old, possibly older than the Nouveau drivers, but keep trying; it couldn't be a Alpine Linux failure as Nvidia, according to a famous Linus Torvalds quote, has already been less than friendly to Linux developers in the past.
    - Gordonjcp 4y ago
      And yet NVidia have the only graphics cards with working 3D acceleration and GPU compute capabilities.
      - LoganDark 4y ago
        Not true. It's just that AMD reserves those capabilities for the expensive server cards whereas Nvidia allows regular desktop gaming cards to do everything.
  - LAC-Tech 4y ago
    I bought a barebones PC specifically for my linux work station. One criteria from the outset was no NVIDIA.
- euclaise 4y ago
  Can't have CUDA without nvidia, and can't have nvidia without glibc
stonogo 4y ago
It's funny what different people find interesting in Alpine. I started using it expressly because it uses musl. Void is a distro with similar principles that offers a glibc version, so I use that when I need GNU.
- sph 4y ago
  What's the benefit of musl that you don't get with glibc?
  - LoganDark 4y ago
    musl is statically linked, so each binary can update at their own leisure. There are no system-wide libc updates to break anything.
    - MuffinFlavored 4y ago
      How much space is added to each app to include the needed parts of app-level libc?
      - netr0ute 4y ago
        I don't know, but for statically linked glibc, it adds a couple megabytes to each binary that uses it. That may or may not be great if you're concerned about cache optimization, which is one big reason why dynamic linking is still so popular.
        ComputerGuru 4y ago
        glibc doesn't actually support statically linking. (You can force it, but it breaks things.)
        anyfoo 4y ago
        Yep. There's a reason why macOS and iOS have a giant (easily 1GB) "shared cache" that is most of the libraries that make up the OS in a giant file, mapped into every process's address space. Without shared linking, in your example you end up with a copy of glibc and whatever else in every process. Without some fancy page deduplication scheme (that would come with its own set of problems), the kernel cannot know that all these pages in all these processes are the same. And they might not even be, because different versions and just the process of static linking itself might make an arbitrary number of them look slightly different. Not every program needs all of glibc, so not all of it will be paged in, but still, it looks like you will pollute your CPU caches with many copies of essentially the same thing.

What problems did you encounter? I installed Alpine on some laptops for desktop use and never had a problem except with one HP small netbook where the energy management seems broken as the kernel rewrites somewhere the screen backlight value with a value of 4 (= almost invisible) as soon as I pull the DC plug but doesn't update it when I plug it back. This also happens with ACPI and all power management uninstalled, so I sorta solved this by installing ACPI and making scripts to echo the right value back. This problem aside, I could install a lot of non trivial things, including for example WINE and Yabridge to use music plugins. Unless the system pulled them unbeknownst to me, I made no use of flatpaks and the like. The more I use Alpine, the more I like it.

LoganDark 4y ago
> What problems did you encounter? I personally found it difficult to get Nvidia drivers & Steam working. The latter worked with flatpaks, but Nvidia is always annoying. Yes. You may laugh at me for trying to use Linux on a computer that was not built for it.
- squarefoot 4y ago
  One of my favorite quotes, no idea about the author or the date, is "discoveries are made by not following instructions". Laughing because you're trying to get more from a machine that is built to give less would be really stupid; that is actually clever and admirable, and when one succeeds it gives extreme satisfaction. As for Nvidia drivers I can't help because my last experience with their cards is quite old, possibly older than the Nouveau drivers, but keep trying; it couldn't be a Alpine Linux failure as Nvidia, according to a famous Linus Torvalds quote, has already been less than friendly to Linux developers in the past.
  - Gordonjcp 4y ago
    And yet NVidia have the only graphics cards with working 3D acceleration and GPU compute capabilities.
    - LoganDark 4y ago
      Not true. It's just that AMD reserves those capabilities for the expensive server cards whereas Nvidia allows regular desktop gaming cards to do everything.
- LAC-Tech 4y ago
  I bought a barebones PC specifically for my linux work station. One criteria from the outset was no NVIDIA.
euclaise 4y ago
Can't have CUDA without nvidia, and can't have nvidia without glibc

stonogo 4y ago

It's funny what different people find interesting in Alpine. I started using it expressly because it uses musl. Void is a distro with similar principles that offers a glibc version, so I use that when I need GNU.

sph 4y ago
What's the benefit of musl that you don't get with glibc?
- LoganDark 4y ago
  musl is statically linked, so each binary can update at their own leisure. There are no system-wide libc updates to break anything.
  - MuffinFlavored 4y ago
    How much space is added to each app to include the needed parts of app-level libc?
    - netr0ute 4y ago
      I don't know, but for statically linked glibc, it adds a couple megabytes to each binary that uses it. That may or may not be great if you're concerned about cache optimization, which is one big reason why dynamic linking is still so popular.
      - ComputerGuru 4y ago
        glibc doesn't actually support statically linking. (You can force it, but it breaks things.)
      - anyfoo 4y ago
        Yep. There's a reason why macOS and iOS have a giant (easily 1GB) "shared cache" that is most of the libraries that make up the OS in a giant file, mapped into every process's address space. Without shared linking, in your example you end up with a copy of glibc and whatever else in every process. Without some fancy page deduplication scheme (that would come with its own set of problems), the kernel cannot know that all these pages in all these processes are the same. And they might not even be, because different versions and just the process of static linking itself might make an arbitrary number of them look slightly different. Not every program needs all of glibc, so not all of it will be paged in, but still, it looks like you will pollute your CPU caches with many copies of essentially the same thing.