Alpine Linux 3.24.0 released
21 points by achill
21 points by achill
Good to see setup-alpine now supports the limine bootloader. I'm looking forward to the day s6-rc and s6-linux-init is also provided as an option in the setup script.
Anyone running Alpine Linux on Edge? (ie rolling release)
I switched over to arch because I hated the Alpine update process (ie... having one at all lol). But the more I think about it the more I wonder if I should have just switched to edge, surely it can't be any more "bleeding edge" than arch.
I do. It works reasonable well. Sometimes the package repo is in a funny state and you won't be able to update something immediately due to conflicts.
Have you used Alpine as your desktop distro? If so, (besides these updating woes) how's the experience like?
Just to clarify - not implying you said differently, but just for posterity - the updating woes are the same you have with any non-rolling release distro.
Honestly I liked it and can't remember why I switched to arch apart from that. Very occasionally you'd get software that wouldn't work in musl (deno, steam) but for doing Rust, or Node, or even dotnet it was absolutely fine.
I was considering giving Alpine a try because I heard they were working on a policy that would reject LLM contributions. Looks like that hasn't landed yet?
FWIU the council decided against establishing said policy
https://gitlab.alpinelinux.org/alpine/council/-/work_items/697#note_615564
After writing a couple of fedora specs, I've been eyeing alpine linux as an alternative. Their package format is way simpler. I have fond memories of Gentoo, but I don't want to compile distro packages from source. Alpine seems to fill the same niche but offers binary packages. Although not offering systemd poses a practical challenge, in that I would have to re-learn how to do things in OpenRC (and things like socket-activation that don't have a ready-made alternative would need glue code on a per service basis iiuc. Given that xinetd has been unmaintained for a long time).
I recently learned that Gentoo now offers more binary packages (back when I used Gentoo in the mid 2000's they only did that for a couple of packages like Firefox). So I'm also researching how Gentoo's binhost works.
FWIW the linked comment doesn't reflect the opinion of all members of the council, just of one. And it's also not a final decision to reject a policy.
The repository (https://gitlab.alpinelinux.org/alpine/council/-/tree/master/minutes) contains the official meetings, which contain the decisions taken by the council.
IMHO Alpine Linux is hold back by OpenRC. Yes, it fast and minimal. But it's too minimal, you need supervisors, you need socket activation, it is not declarative, there has been concerns about the maintenance of it, ... This is not new, Alpine has been playing with S6 for some time, postmarketOS which is based on Alpine moved to systemd, ... I think that now that dinit exists, and ships with Chimera, they should try to move. dinit keeps some of the best things of systemd without being systemd.
I've worked at companies pushing 2% (and designed most of the OS layer) and another doing 15% of global Internet throughput and didn't miss any supervisors, socket activation, or it to be natively declarative.
I also run a traditional FreeBSD desktop and don't need any of that bullshit.
I personally agree, but the most difficult task I see in this is migration of existing installations and services. Probably not impossible but difficult. And also the social aspect, many people use Alpine because the lack of systemd.
What I imagine realistic, is to be able to choose between different initsystems/service-manger/supervisor/whatever-you-call-it.
I was very impressed by Alpine Linux RISC-V support. If you have a VisionFive 2 and you update the firmware to the latest U-Boot, you can put the downloaded tar.gz in a FAT32 partition of the microSD and then you're just greeted by GRUB. You can install on the SSD with setup-alpine, and from there it runs perfectly, with GRUB and without the need of a microSD card. In other distros this is not as straightforward.
I am always surprised to hear people using it as a daily desktop though. Nothing wrong with it, to each there own I suppose, but I think Arch is a more sane OS to use.
With that said everything I run in production is on Alpine.
I think Arch is a more sane OS to use.
Good grief, why?
Alpine is what I think of as "Arch but for grownups." As in, for both, you have to do a lot of manual work, configure it yourself, but at the end you have 2 very different things:
In Alpine you have a complete stable system which is slim, neat, elegant, and beautifully lean and spare; it will stay working, and twice a year there is an easy in-place upgrade, which I've never yet seen break an installation.
In Arch, you now have an OS just as massive as any off-the-peg distro, which takes a gig of RAM and has hundreds of things running in the background, and you basically need to update every single day forevermore.
There's only one really sane rolling-release distro I'd use as a daily driver, and that's openSUSE Tumbleweed -- and as I discovered during the COVID lockdowns, if you can only go into the office to update it once every 6 months, something will break during the upgrade, even so. But at least you have snapper and a hope of fixing it.
There's only one really sane rolling-release distro
Nice absolute statement you have there, would be a shame if... ;)
NixOS is rolling and IMO quite sane. Even Debian is almost there I'd say, running dist-upgrade from time to time is easy and usually uneventful.