commit: d4203805fb5067975225d48a9f50561be4495ddc
parent af0d1862d96b194393187f67057c0f6d89b0e012
Author: Drew DeVault <sir@cmpwn.com>
Date: Tue, 25 Jul 2023 21:00:21 +0200
Alpine does not make news
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+---
+title: Alpine Linux does not make the news
+date: 2023-07-25
+---
+
+My Linux distribution of choice for several years has been [Alpine Linux][0].
+It's a small, efficient distribution which ships a number of tools I appreciate
+for their simplicity, such as musl libc. It has a very nice package manager,
+apk, which is fast and maintainable. The development community is professional
+and focuses on diligent maintenance of the distribution and little else. Over
+the years I have used it, very little of note has happened.
+
+[0]: https://alpinelinux.org/
+
+I run Alpine in every context; on my workstation and my laptops but also on
+production servers, on bare-metal and in virtual machines, on my RISC-V and ARM
+development boards, at times on my phones, and in many other contexts besides.
+It has been a boring experience. The system is simply reliable, and the upgrades
+go over without issue every other quarter,[^2] accompanied by high-quality
+release notes. I'm pleased to maintain several dozen packages in the
+repositories, and the community is organized such that it is easy for someone
+like me to jump in and do the work required to maintain it for my use-cases.
+
+[^2]: Or more frequently on edge, which I run on my workstation and laptops and
+ which receives updates shortly after upstream releases for most software.
+
+Generally speaking, Alpine does not make the news.
+
+Red Hat has been in the news lately for their moves to monetize the
+distribution, moves that I won't comment on but which have generally raised no
+small number of eyebrows, written several headlines, and caused intense
+flamewars throughout the internet. I don't run RHEL or CentOS anywhere, in
+production or otherwise, so I just looked curiously on as all of this took place
+without calling for any particular action on my part.
+
+And so it has been for years, as various controversies come about and die off,
+be it with Red Hat, Ubuntu, Debian, or anything else, I simply keep running "apk
+upgrade" every now and life goes on uninterrupted. I have high-quality,
+up-to-date software on a stable system and suffer from no fuss whatsoever.
+
+The Alpine community is a grassroots set of stakeholders who diligently concern
+themselves with the business of maintaining a good Linux distribution. There is
+little in the way of centralized governance;[^1] for the most part the
+distribution is just quietly maintained by the people who use it for the purpose
+of ensuring its applicability to their use-cases.
+
+[^1]: There's some. They mostly concern themselves with technical decisions like
+ whether or not to approve new committers or ports, things like that.
+
+So, Alpine does not make the news. There are no commercial entities which are
+trying to monetize it, at least no more than the loosely organized coalition of
+commercial entities like SourceHut that depend on Alpine and do their part to
+keep it in good working order, alongside various users who have no commercial
+purpose for the system. The community is largely in unanimous agreement about
+the fundamental purpose of Alpine and the work of the community is focused on
+maintaining the project such that this purpose is upheld.
+
+This is a good trait for a Linux distribution to have.
