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They could've just improved Alpine's supply chain (or built on top of it) rather than making a new distro :( But they're a company, so pushing out new products faster is more important than the community.

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We work with much of the Alpine community and some of the maintainers. The glibc choice instead of musl alone means that a separate toolchain and distro is required, but there are also a lot of other distinctions.

We still work with them upstream on apk and apk-tools, and would be happy to collaborate on more tooling.

We have contributed the majority of our improvements in such a way that other APK distributions, including Alpine, can make use of them, and the original plan was to just leverage Alpine for all of this. Indeed, we even sponsored the refactoring of musl's DNS implementation that allows it to support DNS over TCP now.

But we heard overwhelming demand for glibc support from customers. So we built a companion distribution for customers who needed to run GNU/Linux workloads, but still wanted to leverage the advantages of Alpine.

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