So Alpine Linux is a security-oriented, lightweight Linux distribution based on musl libc and busybox. Basically it is a clean and light system that doesn’t have a lot of overhead.
Since it is lightweight I figured I’d use it for Kubernetes. As it turns out, the Alpine system is flippin fast. I can reboot a node in the cluster and it comes back within about 16 seconds. That is way faster than Debian and especially Rocky. The APK package manager is also extremely fast with a package install being almost instantaneous.
The downside is that it does take a little more knowledge to use. It took a little skill to get k3s and longhorn working on it. I had to add shared to fstab and I installed some basic dependencies like util-linux.
It’s great for a lot of things and my favorite thing is that it uses OpenRC and not systemd.
Very fast in boot-up time and since it’s not parallised for the hell of it, like systemd, you can get dependencies very nicely worked out, which is important in embedded systems because a service needs to be up and running and finished its full execution before another service starts. Man so much trouble getting that in any way to work in systemd.
I use it for basically all my servers, routers whatever I can get it to work on.
The downside is however that some packages are simply not really available if it’s a little more exotic.
And it’s not exactly the greatest if it comes to a dev environment especially cross-compiling.
Use it for work all the time. Running container specific workloads for quick spin-up, do thing, tear down is very efficient when working in the cloud… which, would nicely translate to keeping a local implementation lightweight.
Terraform + docker in a pipeline is pretty handy. In my case, its the defacto choice for our build pipeline work. Github repos get a full treatment of CI steps thanks to this distro.
Depending on what you want to do with it, orchestrating the spin-up is really nice.
I can’t tell if you’re trying to use it as your daily driver OS or for doing work-load job type things. Either way, its great.