Back from Alpine to Debian as my daily driver. Here are the reasons:
1. Alpine doesn't support a very niche fan control utility made by one guy for my specific laptop, and HP left me with no alternative
2. Alpine doesn't have OpenSnitch, period
3. My laptop is quire powerful, so the speed difference is insignificant.

If it wasn't for this two super specific edge cases, I would've stayed on Alpine --- such a marvellous OS it was.

Whaha I knew it. Been there done that.

I mean I only use alpine to make slim pipeline/release docker images. Brave of you to try but yeah theres lots of incompat issues for daily driving.
I really can' t handle non rolling release distros nowadays thpugh. Half the fucking system breaks due to dist upgrade.

@rootshell alpine is not a rolling release distro

arch is betta

@antigermanist arch is beta

can you install glibc on Alpine for programs that need it, or is all other software you use besides these two completely libc agnostic?

@lorentz I don’t know. If you want glibc, alpine is probably a bad idea to begin with

@kiki hence me not using it as an daily driver. (:

@rootshell to be honest, being able to setup gnome by just running one command that alpine devs added there is an oddity that isn't what alpine is about. Alpine is about being very good at one specific thing (very small os with up-to-date dev-related server stuff to be used in containers), and that's about it. It _should_ be a pain in the ass to set up. It _should_ feel hostile to a regular ubuntu user. Thus, that gnome setup experience misled me into trying to daily-drive alpine. Apart from that, setting up literally everything else was a pain in the ass.

Opensnitch is open source, so, if I armed myself with a capable model like gpt-4.5, I could've recompiled it for alpine. I just didn't want to because sooner or later, some other highly specific thing that works out of the box in every other os wouldn't have worked on my pc. I didn't like this at all.

@rootshell also, if you need flatpak to bail you out when you can't install regular ass software on your os, that's a bad sign.

@kiki thats why I love arch based distro's. I barely ever had to repack debs or other forms to something arch will like combined with the AUR. Came for the meme stayed for the comfort.
Alpine is the pain in the arse if the package is not compatible with its libc, thus forcing you to compile a lot yourself.
Its hella small so freaking love it for pipelines. Actually converting my current companies pipeline between alpine and a few other best practices from ~60 to ~17 mins tho goal be sub 1 minute. Sadly tests are touching DB so gonna be hard. For that stuff alpine is lovely though. (Still need to compile a fair bit in the base image tho)

@rootshell the stuff I need works pretty much everywhere. Node, postgres, nginx

@kiki yeah too be fair I dont need much fancy nowadays either. Back in the day between reverse engineering, cross compiling, etc. I did have the need for a lot of niche stuff or stuff you could only really compile yourself.
Nowadays I'm just a webdev, do miss doing some crazy stuff tho. I def dont need my 128GB of RAM and 24 threads when the most heavy thing I run is an webbrowser. 😂

@rootshell all modern sites gain fat faster than my laptop gains ram. So yeah, in a year or two, you would need all that power to run websites. The whole premise of netbooks was "this is a small cheap laptop for lightweight tasks like web browsing"... today web browsing is the heaviest thing my laptop does, bar games

@kiki Yeah, stuff is so bloated nowadays. I remember poking an network card to check if it was iPXE compatible otherwise loading an iPXE kernel then running my own little hand rolled assembly programs to test hardware without leaving the mode it was in. (I think it was real mode, so even before jumping to protected/long mode)

Nowadays people just yeet gigs off stuff just to run the simplest of things, while having barely better or even worse feature sets.

@lorentz It can be done, it's not super straightforward, at least at the time I did it you had to compile it yourself. But in case you REALLY need it it's an option.

Oh look, the glibc is probably outdated as hell but this seems pretty easy:

https://github.com/sgerrand/...

@rootshell scratch that some more duckfoo and there seem to be plenty of options now, even prepacked as an docker image.

It was an pain in the arse due to an circular dependency back then IIRC and node really didn't work well musl libc.

@retoor When was the last time you ran gentoo ;P I did for a while in uni https://youtube.com/watch/...

@rootshell It was the same for me with arch, aur is just solves the problems I have with distros like debian/ubuntu (I also installed gentoo for similar meme reasons, aka that yt video earlier)

@BordedDev I'm mostly burned by dist-upgrades, they always seem to mess up my system so badly that it's quicker to reinstall.

@rootshell That as well, I had an arch install I haven't used for about a year or so, and well, just ran `pacman -Syu` and upgraded no problem