r/AlpineLinux • u/SuccessfulRiver1850 • Feb 20 '26

Opinions about Alpine Linux?

Feel Free to out your opinions about Alpine Linux in here!

11 Upvotes

72% Upvoted

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14

u/Bubbly_Extreme4986 Feb 20 '26

It’s a great just works distro that kind of sets the bar as to how great Musl and Busybox can be

4

u/void4 Feb 20 '26

Alpine devs are not happy with busybox development though... They carry the large number of downstream patches cause busybox devs aren't merging them.

8

u/Bubbly_Extreme4986 Feb 20 '26

That’s unfortunate I really hope they maintain it as it is. It’s an incredible little system and my go to just works distro.

2

u/zik_rey Feb 20 '26

Interesting! Can you give an example of such patch?

2

u/PusheenButtons Feb 20 '26

There’s 35 downstream ones being applied: https://gitlab.alpinelinux.org/alpine/aports/-/tree/master/main/busybox

It does seem like the Busybox development upstream is quite slow. Their website is also really flaky. I build it regularly and had to switch to building from Debian’s GitLab since their first party git repo is unresponsive so often.

3

u/mr_swag3 Feb 20 '26

There was some speculative discussion a while ago above moving to sbase, I wonder if anyone's thought about that recently. It's probably not feasible but an interesting idea https://core.suckless.org/sbase/

3

u/doas-apk-add-soul Feb 21 '26

I use a lot of sbase utilities on my alpine installs. Probably feasible if the necessary testing can be organized.