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Alpine-does-not-make-news.md (3228B)

    

  1. ---
  2. title: Alpine Linux does not make the news
  3. date: 2023-07-25
  4. ---
  6. My Linux distribution of choice for several years has been [Alpine Linux][0].
  7. It's a small, efficient distribution which ships a number of tools I appreciate
  8. for their simplicity, such as musl libc. It has a very nice package manager,
  9. apk, which is fast and maintainable. The development community is professional
  10. and focuses on diligent maintenance of the distribution and little else. Over
  11. the years I have used it, very little of note has happened.
  13. [0]: https://alpinelinux.org/
  15. I run Alpine in every context; on my workstation and my laptops but also on
  16. production servers, on bare-metal and in virtual machines, on my RISC-V and ARM
  17. development boards, at times on my phones, and in many other contexts besides.
  18. It has been a boring experience. The system is simply reliable, and the upgrades
  19. go over without issue every other quarter,[^2] accompanied by high-quality
  20. release notes. I'm pleased to maintain several dozen packages in the
  21. repositories, and the community is organized such that it is easy for someone
  22. like me to jump in and do the work required to maintain it for my use-cases.
  24. [^2]: Or more frequently on edge, which I run on my workstation and laptops and
  25.     which receives updates shortly after upstream releases for most software.
  27. Red Hat has been in the news lately for their moves to monetize the
  28. distribution, moves that I won't comment on but which have generally raised no
  29. small number of eyebrows, written several headlines, and caused intense
  30. flamewars throughout the internet. I don't run RHEL or CentOS anywhere, in
  31. production or otherwise, so I just looked curiously on as all of this took place
  32. without calling for any particular action on my part. Generally speaking, Alpine
  33. does not make the news.
  35. And so it has been for years, as various controversies come about and die off,
  36. be it with Red Hat, Ubuntu, Debian, or anything else, I simply keep running "apk
  37. upgrade" every now and then and life goes on uninterrupted. I have high-quality,
  38. up-to-date software on a stable system and suffer from no fuss whatsoever.
  40. The Alpine community is a grassroots set of stakeholders who diligently concern
  41. themselves with the business of maintaining a good Linux distribution. There is
  42. little in the way of centralized governance;[^1] for the most part the
  43. distribution is just quietly maintained by the people who use it for the purpose
  44. of ensuring its applicability to their use-cases.
  46. [^1]: There's some. They mostly concern themselves with technical decisions like
  47.     whether or not to approve new committers or ports, things like that.
  49. So, Alpine does not make the news. There are no commercial entities which are
  50. trying to monetize it, at least no more than the loosely organized coalition of
  51. commercial entities like SourceHut that depend on Alpine and do their part to
  52. keep it in good working order, alongside various users who have no commercial
  53. purpose for the system. The community is largely in unanimous agreement about
  54. the fundamental purpose of Alpine and the work of the community is focused on
  55. maintaining the project such that this purpose is upheld.
  57. This is a good trait for a Linux distribution to have.