However, it's great for small servers. I use raspberry pis and old computers to serve applications at home, and I just switched them all to Alpine. Perfect for that use case; orders of magnitude better than something like ubuntu server. I would highly recommend it for server.
Quick edit before anyone gets all offended: yeah it could be used for desktop, I just wouldn't recommend it. Especially coming from arch, the AUR represents a massive repository of software. It will likely be a while befire Alpine is in a similar position, especially if they want to stick to their musl static-link ethos. It's a lot easier to deal with compiling and possibly minor porting yourself for a single-porpose server box (only needs a few apps) vs a multi-purpose general box (needs many).
In my experience, it's extremely viable. Most things you can get away with pulling from the Alpine repos, everything else you can stick in a chroot (musl libc causes some problems with compatibility) or compile from source (Which is usually quicker than you'd think, except when C++ gets involved).
It's so much more stable than any other modern linux system I have run. Someone I know has a twin X230 with Manjaro on, and the boot-up time is so long. I managed to get my Alpine box to 40 seconds to gui, but was limited by the dhcp resolution and the pre-boot flashups. Manjaro takes about three or four minutes to get to the login screen, and then another minute or two to load the GUI.
My much more powerful arch box has about the same bootup times as the X230, even though theoretically I am using lighter technologies. Something I have noticed as well is that because of systemd running boot items concurrently, it actually ends up with a less deterministic boot. A lot of the times it simply fails to resolve wifi on boot (leading to a several minute hang), and the systemd logs and dmesg show absolutely nothing at fault.
And since manufacture driver support for AMD is not there (my cards are over 5 years old) -- I found that speed of Wayland is really good.
So I 'standardized', on Fedora and just upgraded from 27 to 29 in one shot, using their upgrade plugin with 0 problems (had to uninstall like 3 packages and put them back).
This is from a DietPi x86-64 install onto a Virtualbox VM, XFCE desktop plus an open terminal and both Firefox and LibreOffice loaded; Firefox showing mozilla.org webpage and Libreoffice Writer an empty page. Not bad at all! Although I prefer Armbian for embedded boards, DietPi really screams on small netbooks.
dietpi@DietPi:~$ free
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 2052524 464456 1112748 41452 475320 1405128
Swap: 45052 0 45052
If this wasn't an issue, I would not use anything else on the desktop.
Dynamic linking is everywhere on Inferno, implemented by the same Rob Pike of that email thread.
Also many seem unaware that Go supports dynamic linking for a couple of versions already. The only thing missing is building plugin libraries on Windows.
I am aware of Inferno.
Also, the irony in talking about "HNers" as an Other, when you yourself are, to me, a random HNer. It's like an Anon implicitly complaining about an Anon, rather amusing.
> Dynamic linking is everywhere on Inferno, implemented by the same Rob Pike of that email thread.
Sure, but (if I remember correctly) Inferno also is written on/as a virtual machine. Inferno had rather different aims compared to most "UNIX" systems, whereas Plan 9 was a unification and generalization of the "UNIX" paradigm.
Windows NT (Or was it DOS) was built, in part, off of UNIX. That doesn't mean that we should look to Windows NT as an ideal UNIX system, because the design considerations are different, and the aims of the system are different.
> Also many seem unaware that Go supports dynamic linking for a couple of versions already.
Sure, that's not to say there wasn't a huge amount of debate around that. I believe in the end it was more or less agreed that language uptake was more important in this case, but I could be wrong. Regardless, if one is properly appraised of the debate around Go supporting dynamic linking, you can find Uriel, et al. have some solid arguments against dynamic linking.