Systemdīeside not using glibc there's also no systemd in Alpine. don't use proprietary software :)įor the cases where that's not possible there's always either Flatpak or making a chroot with a glibc distribution in it. Issues appear mostly when trying to run proprietary software on top of Alpine or software that's so hard to build that you're in practice just getting the prebuilds. In practice I don't have many problems with this since most my software is just packaged by in the distribution so I wouldn't ever see that it's a musl distribution. Alpine Linux is a musl-libc based distribution. One of the main "issues" that get raised with Alpine is that it does not use glibc. Throwing away the original error and showing "user friendly" messages usually does not improve the situation. Things I'm missing is optional packages and when things go wrong it has some of the most useless error messages I've encountered in software: temporary error (try again later). There's also some downsides to apk though. It's basically the requirements.txt file for your Linux installation and you don't even need to use any extra configuration management tools to get that functionality. Things like the /etc/apk/world file makes management machines easier. You wouldn't normally put Arch Linux on a production server but I found Alpine to be almost perfect for that usecase. This improves reliablity a lot for my machines. Some more differences are that Alpine provides stable releases on top of the rolling edge release branch. The end result is that my Archlinux installations are using around 10x the disk space my Alpine installations use if I ignore the home directories. For most Linux users you'd never need the library documentation which takes the most space in this example. In Arch Linux this is a single package called libtiff that's 6.2 MB. tiff-tools, command line tools like ppm2tiff.tiff, the main package that contains libtiff.so.6.In Alpine Linux this is split into 5 packages: Alpine splits out all these things to subpackages and the build system warns when the main package contains any documentation or development files.įor a minimal example of this let's compare the tiff library. file that contains all the features of the application and all the docs and development headers. The larger difference is the packaging mentality: Archlinux prefers to never split packages, just one. The APKBUILD package format is very similar to the pkgbuild files in Arch and the packages support similar features. The package management is pretty similar to Archlinux in some aspects. apk format it predates Android by two years. While it's now confused with the android. Alpine has it's own package manager called APK, the Alpine Package Keeper. The package management is always one of the big differentiators between distributions. It's about as easy as using the Ubuntu installer if you can look past the fact that it's text on a black screen.Ī minimal Alpine installation is quite small, that combined with the fast package manager makes the install process really really quick. Installing Alpine Linux is done by booting a live cd into a shell and installing from there just like Arch but it provides the setup-alpine shell script that runs you through the installation steps. I believe Arch since has added a setup wizard now but I have not tried it. Installing Arch Linux the first time is quite an experience the first time. Ubuntu has the easy graphical installer of course. Due to postmarketOS I found out about Alpine Linux and now after using that for some years I think I should write a post about it. For a long time I was an Ubuntu user (with compiz-fusion ofcourse), then I used Arch Linux for years thinking it was the perfect distribution. I've used various Linux distributions in the past, starting with a Knoppix live CD a long time ago.
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