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It’s a great exercise but this is akin to Alpine Linux: it works for some things but you wouldn’t use it as your daily driver

tlamponi 4y ago
Well, Alpine Linux actually works with backward compat (as glibc can be easily installed) and uses a few dozens MiB of RAM. FWIW, I use Alpine Linux on my pinephone in the form of postmarketOS (an Alpine derivative) with a full-fledged KDE desktop, running Firefox alongside. IOW., you can use it as daily driver just fine, just need to install the respective packages - which naturally makes it use more resources, but even then far from what Windows will use.
anthk 4y ago
Alpine worked great in my netbook with 2GB of RAM. Advanced browser support, MESA 22 with GL 2.1 for the old iGPU, Libreoffice... everything basic ran faster than any typical distro. Alpine with XFCE + dhpcdp-ui as a "WiFi seeking menu" would run circles around Windows 11 using 1/10 of the same RAM. With Bluetooth support with Blueman and everything.
kytazo 4y ago
Well, to be honest, I've been daily driving alpinelinux for quite a while, first on an x86 desktop and nowadays on my apple silicon macbook. In my experience alpine is a good fit from anything between an OCI container all the way up to a full fledged desktop or your server. But that's not all, you can have it running on your rpi or even your smartphone as architectures like arm are really a first-class citizen something relatively uncommon even with popular distros like arch which has only a fraction of its packages available for different architectures. Alpine may come pretty bare-bones by default but don't let that fool you, its more than capable for at least anything a regular distro is if you know what to do with it. Even if you're a casual linux user you can get it setup in no time by using the setup-* commands that it ships with eg setup-desktop which takes care of setting up a desktop environment without you having to worry about dbus,seatd,compositors or things like that. Also their repositories are filled with almost any package someone would need and can always be coupled with complementary package managers like nix and flatpak in cases where apk isn't enough. I love alpine and the aforementioned causes do justice a fraction of reasons, especially when considering things like running on a much leaner and modern c runtime musl instead of glibc, being systemd free and having a minimal dep, bare-bones/ bloat-free philosophy as it was originally intended for use on constrained embedded devices like routers. Its one of, if not the best distros available in my opinion, amongst nixos and gentoo which I deeply respect as well. That being said, one has to factor in the drawbacks some of these features like systemd-free and musl imply when assessing combatibility but I'm having trouble remembering cases where I've ran into deadlocks even on exotic setups like alpine on aarch64 architecture running natively on a M1 macbook with a custom kernel like asahi-linux or a sdm845 oneplus 6T smartphone with pmOS.
npteljes 4y ago
Not really the same. This Windows is more like an experiment, like Bellard's Linux in the browser. If you'd like to use a less annoying Windows as a daily driver, LTSC is the way to go. https://bellard.org/jslinux/ https://bellard.org/jslinux/

tlamponi 4y ago

Well, Alpine Linux actually works with backward compat (as glibc can be easily installed) and uses a few dozens MiB of RAM. FWIW, I use Alpine Linux on my pinephone in the form of postmarketOS (an Alpine derivative) with a full-fledged KDE desktop, running Firefox alongside. IOW., you can use it as daily driver just fine, just need to install the respective packages - which naturally makes it use more resources, but even then far from what Windows will use.

anthk 4y ago

Alpine worked great in my netbook with 2GB of RAM. Advanced browser support, MESA 22 with GL 2.1 for the old iGPU, Libreoffice... everything basic ran faster than any typical distro. Alpine with XFCE + dhpcdp-ui as a "WiFi seeking menu" would run circles around Windows 11 using 1/10 of the same RAM. With Bluetooth support with Blueman and everything.

kytazo 4y ago

Well, to be honest, I've been daily driving alpinelinux for quite a while, first on an x86 desktop and nowadays on my apple silicon macbook. In my experience alpine is a good fit from anything between an OCI container all the way up to a full fledged desktop or your server. But that's not all, you can have it running on your rpi or even your smartphone as architectures like arm are really a first-class citizen something relatively uncommon even with popular distros like arch which has only a fraction of its packages available for different architectures. Alpine may come pretty bare-bones by default but don't let that fool you, its more than capable for at least anything a regular distro is if you know what to do with it. Even if you're a casual linux user you can get it setup in no time by using the setup-* commands that it ships with eg setup-desktop which takes care of setting up a desktop environment without you having to worry about dbus,seatd,compositors or things like that. Also their repositories are filled with almost any package someone would need and can always be coupled with complementary package managers like nix and flatpak in cases where apk isn't enough. I love alpine and the aforementioned causes do justice a fraction of reasons, especially when considering things like running on a much leaner and modern c runtime musl instead of glibc, being systemd free and having a minimal dep, bare-bones/ bloat-free philosophy as it was originally intended for use on constrained embedded devices like routers. Its one of, if not the best distros available in my opinion, amongst nixos and gentoo which I deeply respect as well. That being said, one has to factor in the drawbacks some of these features like systemd-free and musl imply when assessing combatibility but I'm having trouble remembering cases where I've ran into deadlocks even on exotic setups like alpine on aarch64 architecture running natively on a M1 macbook with a custom kernel like asahi-linux or a sdm845 oneplus 6T smartphone with pmOS.

npteljes 4y ago

Not really the same. This Windows is more like an experiment, like Bellard's Linux in the browser. If you'd like to use a less annoying Windows as a daily driver, LTSC is the way to go. https://bellard.org/jslinux/ https://bellard.org/jslinux/