{
  "$type": "site.standard.document",
  "description": "I love the ideas behind this lightweight distribution, but it's challenging in practice.",
  "path": "/decisions/alpine/",
  "publishedAt": "2025-10-19T00:00:00Z",
  "site": "at://did:plc:bnr33h7nafe5nk4zzlshvana/site.standard.publication/3mnb3xdhll227",
  "tags": [
    "Linux",
    "Alpine"
  ],
  "textContent": "Recently I spent a few days exploring Alpine Linux . For years I've followed advice to use Alpine in container builds as a lightweight base image. Recent casual reading got me thinking about possibly using Alpine as a base for a custom desktop distribution or (more seriously) for appliances that run containers using Nomad or directly with Docker or Podman. I had some spare Raspberry Pis and was able to quickly install Alpine on one using rpi-imager . From there I set up Podman, Nomad, and Vault in a four-node Alpine-based cluster of Raspberry Pis. My first impressions were great: even on my Pi 4's, Alpine felt snappy. In hindsight, I think this was partly because Alpine had a better default sshd configuration which made logging in faster on my Alpine Pis than my Ubuntu-based ones. But it was also undeniably faster to install and set up. After digging a bit deeper, I'm pausing my Alpine explorations. I don't have a compelling enough use to make it worth addressing the disadvantages noted below. Ubuntu is working out well enough for me and is less of a barrier to potential adopters. Still, Alpine is a tempting base that I might dig into again. Pros Alpine is lightweight and feels really fast on my Raspberry Pis. Alpine's founder (Natanael Copa, Meet the Creator of Alpine Linux ) seems like an effective steward. Building the core utilities on busybox seems clever and efficient. musl seems like a good idea. Without looking into it, it's easy to believe that libc is bloated. OpenRC is easy to configure and use. I really like the packaging system ( apk ); it was easy to use it and not hard to set up a repository. Tailscale is in the community repository and was easy to install. With it, I can ssh into my Alpine machines from any machine in my tailnet. Although I had to build these tools myself, I was easily able to get Nomad, the Nomad Podman driver, and Vault running on a small cluster of four Raspberry Pis. Cons Of these, the \"major\" problems are ones that I don't want to solve myself, the \"minor\" ones are ones that I think I could easily deal with, and \"nits\" are things that bug me but that I can easily accept. Major: musl has memory allocation performance problems . WizOS uses libc instead of musl, but do I really want to use a corporate distribution? (No.) Major: Tailscale doesn't fully work in Alpine, apparently due to DNS problems. tl;dr I can't see other machines in my tailnet from my Alpine nodes. Maybe I'm too dependent on Tailscale now, but this currently trips me up. Minor: The cloud providers that I currently use (Digital Ocean and Google) don't offer Alpine images. This has been said to be due to a lack of cloud-init support, or to difficulty adapting to OpenRC. These problems seem to be addressed by third-party projects and the Alpine project offers cloud images . I found that Linode and Hetzner (and possibly others) directly offer Alpine images, although I didn't try either. Minor: I didn't work out a way to automate setup of my Pi Alpine instances. Minor: It seems risky to use Alpine on a desktop. I'm not currently interested in digging deeper into Linux desktop environments. Minor: Nomad and Vault were removed from the community repository over licensing issues and I was unable to find another source, so I had to build my own Nomad and Vault instances. Minor: Package generation is nicely centralized in the buildrepo tool, but it would be very slow to sequentially rebuild a large repository. I haven't seen a way to parallelize this, but I expect that it exists somewhere. Nit: Modifying busybox would be hard, but it's trivial to replace individual commands with their own binaries. Nit: I'm not particularly a Lua fan, but I can see its usefulness in apk . Aside Here, without explanation and with all comments removed, is the Alpine /etc/ssh/sshd_config that I used to simplify my Ubuntu configuration and speed up login on my Ubuntu Pis: ",
  "title": "Hold on Alpine Linux"
}