Yes, I know so much of Alpine’s lightweightness comes from not using glibc.
But still, the other options I see are far from being slimmed down. Debian, Ubuntu server, CentOS… They all could use some cuts.
What’s the most slimmed down non-desktop distro that still has a glibc base? I honestly don’t care if it has its own package manager (build tool handles this for me). Just wanna use it in containers for running server apps.
coreos is good for running containers
I like to pronounce this distro as though it rhymes with “Oreos”
Why do you care about “lightweightness”? Are there any hardware constraints? Lightweight in what regard?
Gentoo can be made very slim, and has similarities with Alpine. Also as others have said, Arch is very customisable, and Void is the new hotness in this area.
You could also use Void Linux with glibc but install base-minimal instead of base-system when following this guide: https://docs.voidlinux.org/installation/guides/chroot.html They also have a docker image using busybox (the other thing that makes alpine that minimal). So you could have a look at how they setup it and try that yourself. It is not well tested tho, so it’s probably not a good idea for a server.
Why don’t you want Musl?
I’m running this on a low resource arm64 device. I have had trouble cross compiling to arm64 musl (availability of pre compiled binaries is low).
It also caused me a bunch of random small issues. For example nodejs doesn’t officially support musl binaries. Bunch of random small things, like sdkman not working on musl.
Yes, weird corner cases in musl cause a lot of things to misbehave when run on musl. For example, DNS upgrade to TCP, which is required for certain queries and covered by one of the DNS RFCs, wasn’t implemented in musl for the longest time, although I think it finally got implemented recently. However, there are other cases like this fwiu.
Installing Python packages with pip is a hit-and-miss too
You messed with Debian’s netinstall images? Just enough for you to get on-line and apt-get the packages you acually want, although the ISO does about take up a whole CDR.
Debian even has “slim” docker images that are pretty small.
Debian slim is my go to!
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I think Arch gets pretty close, but I am wondering if anything goes further. Given Arch is tailored for personal computing, I wonder if it adds anything to ease usability that they otherwise would not need to if it was server based. But I think Arch is what I need, you are right. Thanks!
I mean Arch is what you make of it. It can be as lightweight and minimal as you want it to be based on your installation decisions.
“Lightness” in what sense are you after?
Size of distribution? # of packages?
Otherwise you’ll be using basically the same kernel images.
Maybe you should be custom compiling your own Linux Kernel to be even more “lightweight”.
Honestly, of you don’t need to game, alpine is pretty great. Now if you absolutely need glibc… just use Arch, it’s the most lightweight sane person distro I can think of, unless you wanna compile Gentoo that is
What’s keeping you from using uClibc?
I know there is a way to install glibc in alpine. Worked for my admittedly hobbyist use case. I just don’t remember the package name but it’s in there.
