
Minimal Ubuntu – how small can it go? - seenitall
https://blog.ubuntu.com/2018/07/09/minimal-ubuntu-released
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PopsiclePete
When Alpine doesn't cut it, I use Debian's "slim" docker images. 55MB size.
This minimal ubuntu is slightly smaller, but I don't see anything else novel
about it - why should I be excited?

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marenkay
That would be the real question: considering Ubuntu is just a Debian fork,
what is the benefit of using Ubuntu on a server?

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smacktoward
Ubuntu Server comes with a bunch of nice quality-of-life improvements that
make using it more pleasant than using stock Debian, and you get the
predictability of Ubuntu's standardized release cadence (a new release every 6
months on the dot, alongside longer-lived LTS versions).

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ndiscussion
As someone who runs a tiny VPS with stock Debian, I'm interested (but
skeptical).

It's not your job but what do you feel are some of the best QOL improvements?

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smacktoward
Little things. UFW included by default, so you can set up a firewall without
having to wrestle with iptables. do-release-upgrade to handle upgrades,
instead of having to work through a list of release notes each time. Nothing
earth-shaking, just things that sand down some of Debian’s rougher edges.

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ksec
I am guessing that Alpine is gaining traction ( I hope it is anyway ), so
Ubuntu had to respond?

For 24MB more than Alpine, you get the stability and long term support from
Ubuntu. I think a third of the size difference are glibc and muslc?

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FlyingSnake
> The unminimize tool lets you ‘rehydrate’ your image into a familiar Ubuntu
> server package set, suitable for command line interaction.

Nice 'Three body problem' reference they've sneaked in.

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YuriNiyazov
What’s this? Please explain to the uninitiated

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sidmitra
It's a reference to the sci-fi book The three body problem by Liu Cixin[1]. In
that ta mysterious game about an alien planet where its population can be
dehydrated to survive harsh conditions which could last millenia, and then re-
hydrated when the conditions are right.

Although i think the terms hydrate-dehydrate are not unheard of in tech stacks
for example in a django REST framework called tastypie to denote
serialization-deserialization of data.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three-
Body_Problem_(novel)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three-
Body_Problem_\(novel\))

~~~
sli
Yeah it's a pretty widely used term. ReactDOM has a hydrate() method[0] used
to display something on the frontend that has already been rendered by the
backend.

[0]: [https://reactjs.org/docs/react-
dom.html#hydrate](https://reactjs.org/docs/react-dom.html#hydrate)

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cal5k
Cool! Alpine is a neat project, but I find package management on Alpine to be
a uniformly frustrating experience. Having a tiny version of Ubuntu for docker
is a fantastic idea.

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marenkay
What exactly is bothering you about Alpine package management?

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cbluth
Familiarity.

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cal5k
Precisely. It's yet another package manager to learn, and there are just fewer
alpine packages overall.

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ryenus
So the RFC comes true
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16292883](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16292883)

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nikolay
Except that it's not in Docker Hub... yet!

