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by LAC-Tech 1298 days ago
Love Alpine Linux. Only thing stopping me from running it on my main workstation is that my Sublime Text is my main editor and they have no musl version.
4 comments

I like the concept of having a musl-based distro, but the utility of Alpine is frankly limited at the moment.

Sublime is just one case. We had a Python service running in an Alpine container because it was thought as "mean and lean" by someone. Sound choice, right?

Guess what: we used a handful of (popular) Python modules that are backed by native libraries and PyPi didn't have musl-linked versions for them. The "mean and lean" Alpine-based image ended up weighing more than a debian-slim-based image.

I had Alpine running on WSL as my main dev environment for a long time. I've heard the python issues before, but I can confirm node.js stuff all worked flawlessly.

IIRC npm will compile native extensions, sounds like PyPi (is that a package manager?) distributes binaries.

I'm using Alpine as my main workstation, and for those situation (like for Slack) I use flatpak.
Guess I'm already using flatpak for a few packages on my current glibc distro. Not that elegant but better than nothing.
You can install glibc+support libs on Alpine to run third-party software, but YMMV - I've had very mixed results.
Have you tried these options for running glibc software on Alpine?

https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Running_glibc_programs