Alpine – Linux distribution based on musl libc and busybox

Alpine is a really great Linux distribution and I have been using it since before the switch from uClibc to musl. However, it suffers badly from having very few maintainers and things break very often, especially if used on desktop as they don't have enough resources to properly test everything before pushing updates.

Even though Alpine is security focused distribution, you will often have to wait a long time for updates to software with widely exploited security holes, again because of lack of resources, and they are no longer able to depend on grsecurity so I don't know how everything is going to turn out.

Alpine is great if you want a lightweight, systemd free distribution and don't require a high level of stability, but I wouldn't have the nerve to use it for mission-critical things.

If you need mission-critical stability you either have to use a big Linux distribution like Debian and Red Hat Enterprise that all come with systemd or you can use FreeBSD, that's my conclusion.

You need to be aware that a few things work differently in alpine. For instance: no /bin/bash - it's /bin/ash. And you can't do "sleep inf".

I'm also not convinced that musl and "stock" libc do 100% the same thing. And with regards to using it as a container base image I wonder if we might not be shooting ourselves in the foot - sure, it's a smaller image but if that's accompanied by a less efficient memory allocator then we might not be doing ourselves any favours. Not that I've done any actual research around this btw, and I do use it for a container base image (I'm just not sure this is a good idea).

This is great for Docker base images.

This is one of my favorite desktop distributions, even if it isn't meant for a desktop. It fits most of my minimalist needs. I think it would be my first choice if I could just figure out how to setup full disk encryption.

Is LinuxKit's core system based on Alpine?