After that my enthusiasm for Adelie Linux has started to wane, due to their quite sluggish development, it's time to open a new topic about the alternatives, that is distros compiled against musl but not only aimed at advanced users. In fact, it's undeniable that most of the musl-based distros out there are suckless things, very minimalist systems that require a manual installation procedure that would be black magic for newbies. Often few, if any, desktop environments are available (Adelie was designed to be an exception).
Void Linux should be a nice option if it wasn't for their questionable choices of removing packages from their users' systems and their rude and authoritarian attitude. An interesting alternative should be Project Trident, but in the end they are based on Void, despite all the additional features that they offer, and so they are still dependent on Void devs' choices.
Atharaxia is an independent distro that offers a bunch of desktops, though it's the only one that's not able to boot on my system, so I can't really say anything until the dev fixes his stuff.
The only other promising distros I have heard of are Split Linux (based on Void, too) and, last but not least, Kiss Linux, but now we are really venturing out into something that would be intimidating for any newbie :) this is an extremely bare bones distro that needs even the kernel to be manually configured, though someone is trying to create a (still crippled) KDE spin.
You must be reading sysdfree too much :)

Split is amazing, I really liked it. Trident's big contribution is the zfs setup, there is a zfs repository in Obarun by the way, including a kernel modified for it. JM and Eric seem pretty excited about this. There was a zfs based obarun image a while ago, I don't know whether it still exists in the downloads repo.

Kiss and ataraxia are work and heat for your machine. I am not sure if it is worth it though, kiss is really young. The base system works but once you start building community contributed packages to get X working, in my experience things started falling apart. I'd give it some time.

Alpine is pretty solid.

If you want a wide variety of software available as fast as you can download them, I don't think you can do better than void.
The reason I may have been so critical of it is because I invested liking it so much in the past and getting a bit disappointed at times with the way they handle things.
fungal_net wroteYou must be reading sysdfree too much :)
Yep, you got it, in fact sysdfree is my source of inspiration and I was just waiting for your reply :D .
I agree that Void has the widest choice of software, their packages are very up-to-date and, overall, it really impressed me. I had just one issue with my soundcard, but I think I would have found a fix if it wasn't for what I read about their "policy". It's unacceptable that a distro replaces something I have on my HD with an empty package without my consent, and I am not talking about the specific choice of dropping CK2 for elogind (though they admit that they have nothing against systemd after all). Let alone their internal fighting with the project founder leaving, coming back and leaving again...
That said, I didn't mention Alpine for a reason: it's a well established distro with a wide list of packages, but no desktop is officially supported and UEFI support is not fully implemented yet. This rules out many potential average users.
Of course I would love to use an independent, respectful and out-of-the box distro, but apart from the ones I have mentioned above (and maybe Trident, in the near future) for now I see ideas that need time to evolve (like KISS) or that are just one-man projects that who knows how long will survive and improve.
Yep, the first time I got pissed about void is while I was not using ck2 or anything I had a custom menu with some gksu items. All of a sudden they stopped working. So I looked through the xbps log and noticed gksu being recently upgraded, with an empty package. Throw in a few dependencies that were upgraded and it wasn't even possible to reinstall the functional one. I think if I hadn't raised so much hell before they would have done the same with ck2. Instead they kept it without anything being dependent on it, meanwhile Juan had emptied the github for ck2 like they never even had it, and obviously he decided alone on it and told everyone afterwards. So Void, strictly speaking, wasn't an open source distro due to dumb shit like this.

I am still running but not really using, everything I had and never installed elogind, but the principle is you can't commit to be using a system based on a mud-house. Pretend to be an organization and pretty closed at that. They have people packaging for them for years, doing three times more work as some of the devs, but they are not invited in the core team, where each does whatever each feels right. This is how ships shink, and it is a great shame for this to be condemned, where as we both see you can't hardly find a replacement for what void does. Which remains a mystery for babel linux.
Yes, that's a pity that things work like that, this is the way a promising alternative could be able to dig its own grave..I have also found out an interesting distro called Nutyx, not really independent (based on LFS) but with its own package manager, sysvinit as PID1 and a reasonable choice of packages. Too bad that, despite it DOES have musl in its repos, there is no out of the box musl iso like void.
That said, I didn't mention Alpine for a reason: it's a well established distro with a wide list of packages, but no desktop is officially supported and UEFI support is not fully implemented yet
i don't know about UEFI but Plasma works out of the box on Alpine even Gnome (i tested both) and those package are on their official distro. I look closely (and deeply Alpine) and these guys make a REALLY good work. Stable , really stable , easy to install and configure (at least for me).
https://pkgs.alpinelinux.org/packages?name=plasma&branch=edge
https://pkgs.alpinelinux.org/packages?name=xfce4&branch=edge
https://pkgs.alpinelinux.org/packages?name=gnome&branch=edge

Also, 66 works out of the box on it ;)

Trouble comes when you want to use stuff like virtualbox cause of glibc issue...
Also, Adelie provide coreutils instead of using busybox, this make a great difference...

One thing more, the apk package manager is really great too, a little weird when you come from packager like pacman but offers feature really interesting like blocking a package to a specific version and their tools to build a package is so far away ahead makepkg (yes really, makepkg is a shame)
Hey @ eric, always nice to see you chiming in :). In fact, I was sidetracked by what I read on Alpine's wiki:
"The desktop environment in Alpine has no official desktops. Older versions had Xfce4, but now, all GUI and graphical interfaces are community contributed. Environments such as LXDE, Mate, etc are available, but are not fully supported due to some bloated integration."
However if the main desktops seem to work well, I am going to give KDE a shot :). Of course, busybox is quite limited compared to coreutils, but I agree that apk is really fast and great! The only thing that I didn't like is that forceful deletion of packages seems not to work well, while pacman does it flawlessly. For example, I tried to remove VLC from Adelie and it wasn't possible due to the dependency...KDE?? (LOL).
For example, I tried to remove VLC from Adelie and it wasn't possible due to the dependency...KDE?? (LOL).
In this case it's not depending of the packager but on the distro policies decision. I show the alpine dev on their irc channel every day and this really a great team committed on their distro with a goal of stability in mind. The fact to provide a fix release and a rolling release is appreciated. You need to build something stable for a production: take the release. You want test something new before passing it to the production: take the edge.

look at this this: https://repology.org/repositories/statistics

For sure Arch have some package more (compare alpine edge and Arch) but the quality of the works is not the same and i don't talk about the commitment to their users...
That's nice to hear, just one more question before i test it: is it worth using Alpine as a workstation? I see that it's mostly used for Dockers, servers, firewalls and the like.
If you can live without any proprietary driver, alpine is great for workstation.
My AMD Threadripper v3 workstation with Radeon GPU work well with edge (not with stable). I'm waiting for some package to stabilize before making it my main OS. I'm 3d graphist.

@ eric: How to use 66 with alpine?
https://carbslinux.org/ musl busybox(utilities and init) sinit runit and carbs pkg management


Alpine and Adelie both use apk, but as Adelie says their apk is written from scratch and is different from Alpine's apk.

If it is similar with Adelie's and a pkg has come with a bundle, such as KDE desktop, then you can't remove it alone without what brought it in. But if you add it individually then it loses this bundling dependency and can be removed.

I think some of the ex-void devs and packagers that fled due to recent turmoil with Juan, went to Alpine, and I think one went to Artix.

The freedom that pacman gives you to add and remove pkgs without their dependencies I haven't seen in other pkg managers. If you know what you are doing with it, it is a great tool. It appears that with other pkg managers the developers decide what you can install and what you can remove. With arch you are free to break your own installation if you like.

If you want to run chromium on Obarun and not build it (and burn up your machine compiling for 2 days) you can install it without its systemd dependency simply by -Sdd chromium. It works fine, I imagine it loses its cups modifying abilities, which you can circumvent with sudo chromium 127.0.0.1:631 and have the printer shared with all users.

If you are using forked browsers such as palemoon, waterfox, etc. and you are on musl good luck building, they are all precompiled for glibc. Some of them are also oriented for the vast majority of debian based distros, so they are built on glibc that is about a year old (3-4 versions behind Arch), so don't be surprised if you find some glitches on functionality because of this. If firefox-esr is acceptable you can probably borrow it from void-musl.


I am sticking around for an Arch fork based on musl, with pacman, without systemd/elogind s6/66

Maybe, someday not sunday
I'm sorry, for now I have given up on Alpine...The install of the base system was smooth (I have tried to install it on a specific partition) but rebooting via rEFInd brought me a bad surprise: kernel panic. Searching on the web I found a reddit thread where a guy had my same problem and fixed it by himself by somehow editing the refind_linux.conf, but without giving any detail. Too hard for me to do it alone.
@ fungal_net thanks for all of your details and suggestions, I usually install firefox-esr or (if available) librewolf for an even better privacy level. I agree with you, my dream is to have a musl arch-based distro with s6, pacman is the best pkg manager I have used, I really hope that someone dares to think about it any time soon :)
Thoughts alone do not build 60k pkgs and provide servers to access them... It takes manpower and physical/digital resources.

  • [deleted]

  • Post #14
I see a certain enthusiasm around Musl and Alpine Linux with S6/66.
So, I decided to make available a documentation about S6/66 and KDE/Plasma installation on Alpine Linux, enough to keep you busy during the week and the coming weekend. Sorry wife and kids, mountain ride will be for later :D

It is rough, there may be errors or some points to clarify, so I highly recommend testing it first in VM. Also important all the 66 services have not yet been ported.
[h]
====================== S6/66 - KDE/PLASMA ON ALPINE LINUX =====================
[/h]

[h]
-------------------------------------------
PART1: System Installation
-------------------------------------------
[/h]

1) Download Alpine Linux Standard ISO

a) https://www.alpinelinux.org/downloads/

2) Install Alpine Linux Standard ISO

a) Run setup-alpine
b) Select chrony as NTP client
c) Select openssh as SSH server
d) Select sys for standard system installation

[h]
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
PART2: S6/66 minimal installation from a live CD
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
[/h]

WARNING: Replace $DEVICE_PARTITION with the right device partition ( alpine rootfs )

1) Filesystem mounting

live ~# mount /dev/$DEVICE_PARTITION /mnt
live ~# cd /mnt
live ~# mount -t proc none proc
live ~# mount --rbind /sys sys
live ~# mount --rbind /dev dev

2) Chroot

live ~# env -i HOME=/root TERM=$TERM /bin/chroot . sh -l
live ~# export PS1="(chroot) $PS1"

3) Repo and Key installation

(chroot) live ~# apk add -i nano
(chroot) live ~# nano /etc/apk/repositories
(chroot) live ~# https://repo.obarun.org/data/alpine/v3.12/main
(chroot) live ~# cd /etc/apk/keys/
(chroot) live ~# wget https://repo.obarun.org/data/alpine-jm-pubkey/jean-michel@ obarun.org-5f3975a1.rsa.pub
(chroot) live ~# cd /
(chroot) live ~# apk update

4) S6/66 services and system installation/upgrade

(chroot) live ~# apk add -i boot-66serv tty_instance-66serv dhcpcd-66serv sshd-66serv
(chroot) live ~# apk add -i alpine-conf=3.9.0-r2 busybox-initscripts=3.2-r3 alpine-base=3.12.0-r1

5) Trees and boot@ creation/configuration

(chroot) live ~# 66-tree -n boot
(chroot) live ~# 66-enable -t boot -C -F boot@ system
(chroot) live ~# EDITOR=nano 66-env -e -t boot boot@ system

SETUPCONSOLE=!no
RANDOMSEED=!no
POPULATE_SYS=!no

(chroot) live ~# 66-enable -t boot -F boot@ system
(chroot) live ~# 66-tree -nEc root
(chroot) live ~# 66-enable dhcpcd
(chroot) live ~# 66-enable sshd
(chroot) live ~# 66-intree
(chroot) live ~# exit

6) Filesystem umount

live ~# cd /
live ~# umount -lR /mnt/proc
live ~# umount -lR /mnt/dev
live ~# umount -lR /mnt/sys
live ~# umount -lR /mnt

7) Reboot and enjoy S6/66 on Alpine Linux

[h]
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PART3 - KDE/Plasma from the S6/66 minimal installation
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[/h]

WARNING: Replace $USERNAME with the name of your user.

1) KDE/Plasma installation/configuration

alpine66 ~# setup-xorg-base
alpine66 ~# apk add -i plasma dolphin knetattach kate konsole kwalletmanager kleopatra ark falkon

(optional)
alpine66 ~# apk add -i virtualbox-guest-additions
alpine66 ~# apk add -i virtualbox-guest-modules-lts
alpine66 ~# nano /etc/modules-load.d/vbox.conf
vboxguest
vboxsf


alpine66 ~# addgroup $USERNAME audio
alpine66 ~# addgroup $USERNAME video
alpine66 ~# addgroup $USERNAME plugdev
alpine66 ~# addgroup $USERNAME users

2) 66 services installation

alpine66 ~# apk add -i boot-user-66serv dbus-66serv networkmanager-66serv sddm-66serv

3) Trees and boot-user@ creation/configuration

alpine66 ~# 66-tree -nEc system
alpine66 ~# 66-enable dbus networkmanager
alpine66 ~# 66-tree -nEc $USERNAME-session
alpine66 ~# 66-enable -C -F boot-user@ $USERNAME
alpine66 ~# EDITOR=nano 66-env -e boot-user@ $USERNAME

DISPLAY_MANAGER=sddm
XDG_RUNTIME=!no
DESKTOP_CMDLINE=!startplasma-x11

alpine66 ~# 66-enable -F boot-user@ $USERNAME
alpine66 ~# 66-disable -S -t root dhcpcd

4) User tree creation/configuration

alpine66 ~# su $USERNAME -c "66-tree -nEc $USERNAME"
alpine66 ~# su $USERNAME -c "66-enable dbus-session@ $USERNAME"

5) Reboot and enjoy KDE/Plasma S6/66 on Alpine Linux

[h]
-------------------------------------
PART4 - Known issues
-------------------------------------
[/h]

It may be that when you logout and immediately login, KDE/Plasma will not run and leave you with a black screen.
FIX: Put these two lines before '66-all up'

alpine66 ~% nano $HOME/.xsession
66-all down
sleep 01
Hey @ jean-michel, thanks so much, it would be really awesome if I could be able to physically install this! would you please give us instructions for installing Alpine to a specific partition on an UEFI multi-boot environment? I had this kernel panic via rEFInd and I couldn't find any solution on the web, their IRC channel is quite sleepy too :)

  • [deleted]

  • Post #16
wastelander wroteHey @ jean-michel, thanks so much, it would be really awesome if I could be able to physically install this!
You can do it! :) and it is planned on my side, but it will be without uefi because my motherboard does not support it, thank god.
would you please give us instructions for installing Alpine to a specific partition on an UEFI multi-boot environment? I had this kernel panic via rEFInd and I couldn't find any solution on the web, their IRC channel is quite sleepy too :)
You can try with Virtualbox. I know that Refind works with Virtualbox.

Virtualbox > Settings > System > Motherboards : Extended feature : [X] Enable EFI
5 days later
@ fungalnet
A really interesting works
Really interesting in principle, the execution is not that great yet. Too many pkg having conflicts or missing. One of the main problems is zlib libz conflicts. The one is meant to be a fork but pkgs look for the other which conflicts with the one available.
Trying to get enough things to build from source has been hard too.
Their directory structure follow the /sbin /lib /bin ... so it took me a while to make a bashrc with the right paths.
Also there is no mkinitcpio or dracut but they do have a 4.14 kernel, which I think only works on virtual machines.

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