Comment on The Way Ubuntu Boots on Raspberry Pi is Changing
confusedpuppy@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 days agoMy frustration with Raspberry Pi OS is that the packages available were constantly out of date. Some were 2 to 3 years out of date.
I eventually started using Alpine linux on my Pi boards and have been happy since then. Now I can use the latest Docker and Podman packages without manually adding new repositories.
If I didn’t prefer Alpine’s minimal approach, I would have probably gone with Debian because of it’s history in stability.
excess0680@lemmy.world 6 days ago
I believe you may have found your ideal OS. Debian will always lag behind ever so often. And that’s okay. We all use the Pi’s for different reasons.
confusedpuppy@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 days ago
I can appreciate that about Debian. Common tools and stability can be both convinient and reliable. Learning linux is already overwhelming with choices.
Even though I use Alpine for all my Pi boards and laptop, I keep a live usb partition of Linux Mint Debian Edition as my emergency backup. It just works.
Cyber@feddit.uk 6 days ago
I went with Arch Linux on ARM for a minimal approach - did you try that?
Genuninely interested in your experience of Alpine Linux as I’d not considered it on a Pi (only VMs so far…)
confusedpuppy@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 days ago
I haven’t tried arch at all. I used Linux Mint for a year, LMDE for a year and only really started working with command line since last December. I think I chose to try Alpine because I wanted my web facing devices to have the least amount of software installed. Security-wise it made sense to me to have less surface area to exploit.
It took a bit extra effort for me to learn how to use OpenRC as the init system. As well as learning Linux from a bare bones linux perspective.
I actually found using Busy-box Ash interesting to work with and that’s the only shell I currently use. I even wrote a whole script around Rsync in a POSIX friendly way because I liked the idea portable scripting.
If you’re interested, I can send you a link that contains the setup notes for my server. It’s about 85% of my setup process, the rest being some files that are mostly customization that I rsync into place towards the end of the setup process. That can give you an idea of what Alpine on ARM is like.