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Comment by pid-1 | Hacker News Reader

That used to be huge a few years ago.

But with both Ubuntu and Debian shipping much smaller images, I almost always find the hassle of using Alpine not worth it.

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TIL there is a 29MB Minimal Ubuntu!

https://ubuntu.com/blog/minimal-ubuntu-released

Wow, wish there was a Debian version!. I miss JeOS!

There is a ~29MB Debian Docker image:

https://hub.docker.com/layers/debian/library/debian/stable-s...

Wow, I wish there was a Devuan version!

Same currently. Unless I'm just modifying a simple trusted image (which does happen often enough) I just start from Ubuntu during development and only attempt to move the image to Alpine if I'm really trying to improve resource usage down the line.

I've used Alpine pretty heavily but did not run into any hassle aside from "oh yeah forgot to install this package".

Could you go into more detail about the challenges one could encounter when using Alpine?

Alpine uses a different C standard library called musl compared to most well known distros that use glibc. You can run into issues if the application makes use of functions in glibc that musl has not implemented. Usually you run into them in applications that are written in C, such as in some Python modules that utilise C under the hood or in databases etc.

"I can't find $SOFTWARE in $PACKAGE_MANAGER now I have to compile it from source and my life sucks" has happened with me way more times with Alpine than Debian.

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