• dan@upvote.au
    82·
    6 months ago

    What do people use Alpine for? Embedded systems?

    I sometimes see it used for Docker containers, but usually a distroless or “chiseled” container is a better fit and can be even lighter weight.

    • smeg@feddit.ukEnglish
      7·
      6 months ago

      I’ve only seen it used for docker images because it’s so small, but I believe postmarketOS is also based on it

        • cole@lemdro.idEnglish
          5·
          6 months ago

          lol no, it’s alpine based. basing something on Manjaro would be pretty dumb anyways, might as well go straight off Arch (especially dumb since neither have official ARM support which phones need)

        • smeg@feddit.ukEnglish
          2·
          6 months ago

          The biggest upside is that Alpine is small. The base installation is about 5 MB! Thanks to that, our development/installation tool pmbootstrap is able to abstract everything in chroots and therefore keep the development environment consistent, no matter which Linux distribution your host runs on. And if you messed up (or we have a bug), you can simply run pmbootstrap zap and the chroot will be set up again in seconds.

          Another benefit of the tininess of Alpine - many older devices don’t have much storage space to spare, so small system images can be anything ranging from useful to required.

          https://postmarketos.org/faq/

    • hash0772
      2·
      6 months ago

      I used it on my laptop a little while back and it works pretty great. Although the stable software repositories are kind of small (doesn’t even have tcc) which is the reason I switched back to Void. Still, it’s great to see GNU as an operating system component isn’t needed that much anymore in Linux.

      • dan@upvote.au
        2·
        6 months ago

        Interesting - I didn’t know it was complete enough to run on a laptop as I’ve only seen it on servers. Good to know!