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Comment by miki123211 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how a really slimmed down distro like Alpine would compare here, particularly in terms of image size.

It offers most of the standard Linux utilities we know and love, but most of them are actually just symlinks to Busybox, which is ~900K on my (ARM64) system. That's less than a hello world in Go, for a program that can replace most common Linux utilities in daily usage.

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We operate talos and alpine based nodes, many thousands of them. The build chain for alpine is many orders of magnitude more complex than the build pipe for our talos image modifications. Alpine is really not made for doing a lot of “host” tasks and needs much coercion to get it to be capable of running something like k3s, and much more complex to get kubeadm clusters running on it. In the end the complexity is required for flexibility, alpine nodes can be modified on a whim, talos is R/O and ephemeral, but more secure.

Busybox is only 1 binary symlinked hundreds of times

Yes, and?

(They and we all know that. They said as much theirself right in the comment.)

The benefit of Talos isn't low binary count but that _can_ reduce the amount of maintenance required.

The benefit is declarative API driven management. You spend less time automating a system to a desired state in a similar vein Kubernetes provides a declarative API.

What does any of this have to do with my question? You just restated a fact, that busybox is a binary with a lot of symlinks, but why? So what? Yes, also the sky is blue and water is wet. It's like you didn't read the comment you responded to. It wasn't even about the benefit of Talos.

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