We operate talos and alpine based nodes, many thousands of them. The build chain for alpine is many orders of magnitude more complex than the build pipe for our

We operate talos and alpine based nodes, many thousands of them. The build chain for alpine is many orders of magnitude more complex than the build pipe for our talos image modifications. Alpine is really not made for doing a lot of “host” tasks and needs much coercion to get it to be capable of running something like k3s, and much more complex to get kubeadm clusters running on it. In the end the complexity is required for flexibility, alpine nodes can be modified on a whim, talos is R/O and ephemeral, but more secure.