People often think of Alpine only as a base for Docker containers but it runs perfectly on bare metal. The low footprint reduces the attack surface, being systemd and glibc free made it immune to the recent xz attack, for instance.
Fancy climbing the peaks of Alpine Linux? 3.20 is out
Alpine Linux 3.20.0 is out, with initial support for a whole new CPU architecture: RISC-V. It also includes KDE Plasma 6 and GNOME 46, and due to Redis changing its license, Alpine has the new Valkey key-value database in its place. Alpine's former default Xfce desktop, showing enviably svelte vital statistics: it uses 1.1GB …
COMMENTS
-
Wednesday 29th May 2024 13:57 GMT Anonymous Coward
Great article Liam. Alpine is a frequent base image for AppTainer/Singularity/Docker Linux based images, at least in scientific computing. While doing more with less is better overall, for container images/workloads it helps a lot in transferring images to clusters, scheduling lower spec jobs etc.
-
-
-
Wednesday 29th May 2024 18:27 GMT coredump
still runs on 32-bit PC's
Though I haven't yet taken it for a test drive yet, Alpine is one of the Linux/BSD I'm considering for after Debian and FreeBSD end i386/i686 32-bit support.
I'm leaning towards NetBSD, as it's a long-held favorite.
But I haven't ruled out Linux. It seems like several of today's 32-bit Linuxes may drop out when Debian does, however -- e.g. MX Linux -- so the list is likely to shrink.
It's not a huge problem for me, since my 32-bit hardware fleet is small and shrinking, down to 2 little servers at this point; but keeping them running is a hobbyist's labor of fun. :-)
-
-
Thursday 30th May 2024 10:46 GMT Liam Proven
Re: antiX Linux felt bloated and sluggish ..
[Author here]
> If antiX feels sluggish compared to Alpine Linux then it must run like the blazes.
Exactly my point. It makes my old Core 2 Duo machines feel like they are several CPU generations newer than they are, and it makes a frankly gutless Atom feel just about usable.
It is the Linux equivalent of running Windows XP: remove all the bloat and make an old computer feel like a new one.
But, it has the latest LTS kernel and drivers and everything seems to work out of the box for me.
Alpine feels faster than any of the BSDs and it is more versatile: for instance, I can enable compression of data going to swap ( `zswap.enabled=1`), and suddenly there's way less disk access, and I can turn off CPU attack mitigations (`mitigations=off`). I can do that on, say, Raspberry Pi Desktop as well, but that distro takes about 4-5x more disk and about 2x as much RAM.
Alpine feels noticeably quicker. OK, yes, TinyCore is faster still, but it doesn't have a package manager as such and so there isn't anywhere near as much I can do with it. It's amazing but it's not a desktop. Alpine can do what TCL does -- boot from removable media into RAM, let you remove the media, persist changes to another volume etc. -- but it can do much more as well.
AntiX is pretty good but as I said in my review: https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/01/antix_23/
... I feel that they need to get ruthless and decide on _one_ WM, _one_ app menu, _one_ file manager, etc.
Me, I'd lean in to the ROX Desktop, ROX Filer, ROX session. Bundle all the ROX accessories, rip out the 0launch packager, and give it a single (weird) consistent desktop.
But then I loved RISC OS of old.
-
Thursday 30th May 2024 14:59 GMT Yankee Doodle Doofus
Re: antiX Linux felt bloated and sluggish ..
Hmm... I am (was?) planning to put Lubuntu 24.04 on my mother's old, crippled laptop sometime this summer. It's currently on Lubuntu 22.04. I tried to put Linux Mint on it a few years back, but it couldn't handle Cinnamon very well, and I was able to verify that the CPU was the bottleneck. Lubuntu with its LXQT DE works OK. I like to tinker, but mom does not. If I put in the time to set Alpine up with LXQT for her, will the performance improvements be noticeable, and will I get more support calls from dear old mom than I currently do (essentially zero)?
-
Thursday 30th May 2024 18:15 GMT Uncle Slacky
Re: antiX Linux felt bloated and sluggish ..
There are some distros in between that might be more user-friendly than Alpine but still faster than Lubuntu, for example MX Linux, Peppermint OS, Q4OS or Bodhi. However, if you like to tinker, then go with Alpine - once it's up and running it shouldn't need much maintenance.
-
-
-
-
Wednesday 29th May 2024 22:55 GMT AJ MacLeod
My favourite distro for servers, bare metal and VMs. I really appreciate the minimalism - the stuff that's installed and running is basically all essential and there because I've installed it, not layer upon layer of impenetrable automagic sitting there just in case I suddenly want the server to do something completely different one day.
-
Wednesday 8th January 2025 15:06 GMT 897241021271418289475167044396734464892349863592355648549963125148587659264921474689457046465304467
@Liam Proven - How fast does it run on your Sony VAIO P? Tried a bunch of distros a couple of years ago on mine, and antiX was the fastest, usable and useful. I have to open it up again soon to re-seat the MSATA converter, because the 3M self adhesive pad is a smidge too thick (will have to saw through it using dental floss), and I also need to replace the heat resistant tape which bulks up ribbon cable connecting the converter, because that too is also a smidge too thick (probably using thin sellotape, as before [if I haven't damaged the tiny thin ribbon cable by using too thick a tape, increasing pressure on the thickened cable exerted by the tiny clamp {I reckon it'll be ok, but we'll see}])... so I may take the opportunity to pop the MSATA into a desktop PC, reformat and load a bunch of new stuff to try. So many damned tiny screws, will disassemble while recording with a GoPro trained on it this time, because worryingly there are two screws left over. Aaarrrggghh.
I use this thing every day. Was looking for a newer similar sized replacement, can't find one. They're all too damned big and not even remotely pocketable. Mind you, the VAIO P isn't pocketable either, but it's slim enough for me to have had the inner pockets of two coats and two leather jackets altered to fit.