I’m not trying to bait. I’ve been playing with Void for a while, but didn’t get what makes it special. I guess I’m missing something about it.
I’m not trying to bait. I’ve been playing with Void for a while, but didn’t get what makes it special. I guess I’m missing something about it.
Why not Alpine after all?
Fair point, Alpine offers even more customizability by having more init systems, using openrc and busybox instead of GNU core utils. It has a way better built in installer and is also pretty lightweight.
However it was involved in some controversies where the dev team showed themselves biased and it’s also quite inconvenient to use if you have been using GNU tools for a while.
Both distros are neat but I like void cuz its green and alpine is cyan
This is meaningless without specifying what bias.
Any articles about this controversy? Just curious.
Gigachad. /srs
I too would like to know more about this controversies. Some quick web search found me some articles about xlibre rejection as well as preparation for systemd compatibility, none of which should be a big deal.
As for myself, I avoid running Alpine for a full-featured desktop system simply for the fact they’re designed for embedded systems.
I have in fact tried setting it up for desktop use. What made me end up abandoning it was that I ended up having to get rid of the stuff that make the distro special (i.e. busybox and musl) since even the lightest distro requires udev and all.
To be clear, they’re not switching to systemd; they’re just reportedly (I can’t find primary sources on this, only secondary) working on compatibility with programs that expect systemd to be there.
I use Alpine as my desktop daily driver. The
setup-desktop[link] andsetup-devd[link] scripts that come with Alpine are convenient for setting up a desktop environment.There still is some extra work to get things working but the wiki has a good tutorial page which is a good start for setting up a desktop environment on Alpine.
I do think Alpine is quite flexible beyond embedded systems. That’s a lot of effort to include desktop environments in their OS or even in major version release notes.
While I’m aware that it’s completely feasible and even practical to setup desktop on alpine, what drove me away was the fact we’d be ditching musl & busybox for more full-featured solutions anyway.
I often see claims that Alpine linux is just for embedded systems. I wanted to highlight to other people that there is far more to Alpine than embedded systems or being used for containers.
It’s mininal like void but still very flexible and capable if people are willing to work with Musl, BusyBox or OpenRC. It’s a nice option for anyone who has issues with SystemD or may want to depend less on GNU tools.
Like any distribution, it doesn’t fill everyone’s wants or needs but it seems to have grown more than serving just embedded systems.
Musl is the real reason why one would choose Void over Alpine. Glibc allocator is faster and the glibc just has better software compatibility.
i’ve used both void and alpine before switching back to arch. Alpine is great, but it doesn’t support glibc and that compatibility gave me issues installing applications on my laptop. Sure I could setup chroot or a contanarized environment but void offered both options glibc and musl.