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If you have the stomach for starting from nothing and installing only what you need, Alpine is wonderful. It uses musl libc so there are some things you need fl
by Fwirt 3y ago
If you have the stomach for starting from nothing and installing only what you need, Alpine is wonderful. It uses musl libc so there are some things you need flatpaks for, but the vast majority of stuff I've tried just works, and it's small enough that the entire OS is comprehensible to a mere mortal.
- schemescape 3y agoI'm also using Alpine, but 100% of binary distributions of software I've tried have failed to run. Even AppImages don't run on Alpine, due to lack of glibc. It's honestly pretty frustrating--though I don't blame Alpine for this! As a mitigation, I use Nix to run anything that isn't packaged for Alpine (e.g. Deno), and that actually works pretty well, but having a parallel set of libraries kind of defeats my whole purpose for running Alpine, namely a having trim system without any bloat (on a netbook with 1 GB of RAM).
- Gordonjcp 3y agoYou can install glibc on Alpine but it's a shitemare from start to finish. Better to stick to Arch for a very similar user experience.
- schemescape 3y agoYeah, I've found just using Nix on Alpine for glibc-dependent stuff to be the simplest workflow. Note that, in my case, I'm not using Alpine for the "user experience", but solely because it is the most lightweight distribution (important when running on a machine with 1 GB of RAM). I was able to set up a C programming environment on a Raspberry Pi in only 300 MB... of disk space, not RAM! :)