
Alpine – Linux distribution based on musl libc and busybox - smaili
https://alpinelinux.org/
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ClausSualC
Alpine is a really great Linux distribution and I have been using it since
before the switch from uClibc to musl. However, it suffers badly from having
very few maintainers and things break very often, especially if used on
desktop as they don't have enough resources to properly test everything before
pushing updates.

Even though Alpine is security focused distribution, you will often have to
wait a long time for updates to software with widely exploited security holes,
again because of lack of resources, and they are no longer able to depend on
grsecurity so I don't know how everything is going to turn out.

Alpine is great if you want a lightweight, systemd free distribution and don't
require a high level of stability, but I wouldn't have the nerve to use it for
mission-critical things.

If you need mission-critical stability you either have to use a big Linux
distribution like Debian and Red Hat Enterprise that all come with systemd or
you can use FreeBSD, that's my conclusion.

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RantyDave
You need to be aware that a few things work differently in alpine. For
instance: no /bin/bash - it's /bin/ash. And you can't do "sleep inf".

I'm also not convinced that musl and "stock" libc do 100% the same thing. And
with regards to using it as a container base image I wonder if we might not be
shooting ourselves in the foot - sure, it's a smaller image but if that's
accompanied by a less efficient memory allocator then we might not be doing
ourselves any favours. Not that I've done any actual research around this btw,
and I do use it for a container base image (I'm just not sure this is a good
idea).

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exception_e
This is great for Docker base images.

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tuananh
checkout minideb as well
[https://hub.docker.com/r/bitnami/minideb/](https://hub.docker.com/r/bitnami/minideb/)

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dwe3000
This is one of my favorite desktop distributions, even if it isn't meant for a
desktop. It fits most of my minimalist needs. I think it would be my first
choice if I could just figure out how to setup full disk encryption.

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shakna
It's a bit of a task: [0]

[0]
[https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Setting_up_disks_manually](https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Setting_up_disks_manually)

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dwe3000
Thanks for the link!

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moosingin3space
Is LinuxKit's core system based on Alpine?

