this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2023
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Yes, I know so much of Alpine's lightweightness comes from not using glibc.

But still, the other options I see are far from being slimmed down. Debian, Ubuntu server, CentOS... They all could use some cuts.

What's the most slimmed down non-desktop distro that still has a glibc base? I honestly don't care if it has its own package manager (build tool handles this for me). Just wanna use it in containers for running server apps.

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[–] codebam@lemmy.ca 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

coreos is good for running containers

[–] bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 8 points 1 year ago

I like to pronounce this distro as though it rhymes with "Oreos"

[–] Atemu@lemmy.ml 10 points 1 year ago

Why do you care about "lightweightness"? Are there any hardware constraints? Lightweight in what regard?

[–] naptera@feddit.de 7 points 1 year ago

You could also use Void Linux with glibc but install base-minimal instead of base-system when following this guide: https://docs.voidlinux.org/installation/guides/chroot.html They also have a docker image using busybox (the other thing that makes alpine that minimal). So you could have a look at how they setup it and try that yourself. It is not well tested tho, so it's probably not a good idea for a server.

[–] PureTryOut@lemmy.kde.social 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] cyclohexane@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I'm running this on a low resource arm64 device. I have had trouble cross compiling to arm64 musl (availability of pre compiled binaries is low).

It also caused me a bunch of random small issues. For example nodejs doesn't officially support musl binaries. Bunch of random small things, like sdkman not working on musl.

[–] placatedmayhem@lemmy.ml 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yes, weird corner cases in musl cause a lot of things to misbehave when run on musl. For example, DNS upgrade to TCP, which is required for certain queries and covered by one of the DNS RFCs, wasn't implemented in musl for the longest time, although I think it finally got implemented recently. However, there are other cases like this fwiu.

[–] oldfart@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago

Installing Python packages with pip is a hit-and-miss too

[–] Penguincoder 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

nodejs doesn’t officially support musl

Correct; unofficially and it causes some issues when running a NodeJS app on Musl. @cyclohexane@lemmy.ml you can try another unofficial alpine image, or just go with Debian slim

[–] PureTryOut@lemmy.kde.social 1 points 1 year ago

Don't recommend that glibc Alpine image please. You can't just have 2 libc's and expect everything to just work, it's just asking for problems. Either deal with Musl or choose a different distro.

[–] MachineFab812@discuss.tchncs.de 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You messed with Debian's netinstall images? Just enough for you to get on-line and apt-get the packages you acually want, although the ISO does about take up a whole CDR.

[–] meteokr@community.adiquaints.moe 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Debian even has "slim" docker images that are pretty small.

[–] cestvrai@lemm.ee 3 points 1 year ago

Debian slim is my go to!