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Comment by nindalf | Hacker News Reader

I know Alpine is a great fit for any container env but I'm wondering, is it used elsewhere?

I think it's great on the Raspberry Pi [0]. It boots quickly, has a low footprint and runs in diskless mode by default [1].

I most recently used Alpine and a RPi to make an appliance of sorts, that would wait for the SSID of my Olympus WiFi-enabled camera (it acts as an AP) to show up and then sync all new photos automatically [2].

  [0]: https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi
  [1]: https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Installation#Installation_Handbook
  [2]: https://github.com/gvalkov/olympus-photosync-server

I know a few people who actually use it as their main OS

Indeed. Just this week, someone in my hackerspace approached me who had just switched to Alpine on his notebook, and he convinced me to quickly add support for Alpine to the minimalistic configuration management tool that I'm maintaining.

I'm guessing this is the CM tool he was talking about: http://holocm.org/

I use Alpine for the VM at the heart of my GPL WordPress tool InstantWP (https://www.instantwp.com).

I spent six months reviewing all the smaller distributions of Linux until I found one that would boot fast enough to be usable with QEMU. It works like a charm and i rock solid. I highly recommend it.

I used Alpine as the guest OS in VirtualBox VMs. It was useful when I was learning about Docker. It helped me compare containers to virtual machines.

I _think_ it's used by Synology as the basis of their DSM storage OS. At least you can install apk packages so that is my assumption.

not sure about this as Alpine is kind of x86 only. yes it has some armhf and ppc64 versions however it seems x86 is the main target to be run on.

on the other hand, debian, openwrt etc are built for multi-arch all the time.

No, arm, arm64 are well supported for physical install. I think ppc64le and s390x are mainly targeting container installs, but probably work for physical installs too.

Great project based on Alpine:

https://postmarketos.org

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