3 ms·
Also by using Musl and Alpine as a base the amount of software you can put in 700MB it's huge. With 700MB, IceWM and ZZZFM you could fit half a CD even with al
by anthk 3y ago
Also by using Musl and Alpine as a base the amount of software you can put in 700MB it's huge.
With 700MB, IceWM and ZZZFM you could fit half a CD even with all the X.org drivers installed and you could fit Abiword, Gnumeric, Seamonkey, Dillo and so on with ease.
Offering an alternative with Linux-Libre will be interesting too, as often the Libre kernel works faster than the vanilla one, and legacy computers have all the drivers working. Propietary drivers won't work anymore such as Nvidia which some of the older ones might not even compile with DKMS.
- znpy 3y ago700mb used to host the whole ubuntu desktop for many years though
- tutfbhuf 3y agoI don't know if Musl is worth the hassle if one is only interested in the reduced size. I see the point if you have everything statically linked, but with dynamic linking, you have glibc sitting there just once with a few MB, and you don't have to tackle all the issues that can arise when using Musl (e.g., DNS). Alpine's compressed container image is nowadays something like 3 MB, okay, that's very small, but I wish they had an 8 MB glibc version. On the other hand, there is debian-slim, but it's not as good as Alpine when it comes down to stripping down the size, it still weighs in at around 30 MB. I'm still using it, though, although I think it could be smaller.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y agoI run Alpine on a desktop and a couple of laptops (low-end ex-chromebooks, one of them via postmarketos), and it's not really a hassle IME. Granted, I'm not doing a lot of building things from source (or if I do it's in docker and distro is easy to change) so maybe I'm just avoiding the pain, but if your uses are covered by officially packaged software it Just Works™.