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Message-ID: <71feaca5-6992-4c97-bba1-27a2234cfb10@vk4msl.com>
Date: Fri, 3 Apr 2026 09:16:30 +1000
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Subject: Re: Why'd you go with Alpine Linux?
To: ~alpine/users@lists.alpinelinux.org
References: <OpA1zgz--F-9@tuta.io>
From: Stuart Longland VK4MSL <me@vk4msl.com>
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On 2/4/26 07:56, nubesu@tuta.io wrote:
> It's a silly question, I know, but idk, I wanted to write something
> to this mailing list haha. In my case, the answer isn't that deep: I
> wanted a challenge, I thought of Alpine as something hard to use, so
> I wanted to try and see how much I could pull off. And of course,
> I'd also read that it was low end friendly, which was really
> important to me, I think I spent like 2 or 3 days setting up my
> desktop environment and relevant configs, reading wikis, guides,
> trying to get everything exactly how I like it and how I was used
> to.

I ran a lot of servers on Gentoo Linux using the `musl` C library.  Good 
option if you need something bespoke, but the maintenance burden is high 
when you've got more than about a dozen machines that must be regularly 
updated.

Gentoo being rolling release, means you face an uphill battle if you 
leave updates too long.  I have one machine left running Gentoo, an 
ARMv5 industrial PC, and preparing new stages for updating it has been a 
multi-month battle that I'm only *just* beginning to get the upper hand 
on.  (I was going to use Gentoo to bootstrap a port of AlpineLinux to 
install on there, but with AlpineLinux dropping ARMv6 I doubt they'll 
accept a contribution of an ARMv5 port.)

AlpineLinux uses `musl` C library (same as the version of Gentoo I was 
using), `openrc` (same as Gentoo), and has a sane and simple package 
manager that's easy to manage with something like Ansible, and unlike 
Gentoo, has stable release branches (it isn't rolling release).

Using `busybox` also reduces the attack surface greatly.
-- 
Stuart Longland (aka Redhatter, VK4MSL)

I haven't lost my mind...
   ...it's backed up on a tape somewhere.