I've been using Debian as my main server OS for a long time, but yeah I've started using Alpine for lightweight hosts for a single app/docker lately. Especially on proxmox with the pve-helper-scripts you can spin up an Alpine container or VM with Docker in a few seconds.
Comment on Good server OS for Jellyfin
mr47@kbin.social 11 months ago
Everybody is so quick to suggest Debian (and it's a fine choice), but Alpine is great for such things, as well. It's blazing fast, frequently updated, has most packages you could ever want in a server environment (not that it matters if you're planning on using containers). I've been using Alpine for years as my docker host, and not once have I thought "man, I wish it was debian instead".
yamdwich@kbin.social 11 months ago
vegetaaaaaaa@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Not something I’d want on my server :) Partly joking, their lifecycle makes sense if you stay on the major.minor release. Though I find 2 years security support is a bit short - Debian LTS is usually around 5 years, not an excuse to wait for the last moment to upgrade but I find it more comfortable than just 2 years.
One thing to watch for is that alpine uses
muslas it libc, and many programs expect glibc so you might run into obscure bugs. I find it good as base image for OCI images (again there are edge cases), but wouldn’t use it for a general purpose server.mr47@kbin.social 11 months ago
I upgrade as soon as new versions come out, I like living on the edge :) if something goes wrong, there are backups.
As for musl, I haven't mentioned it since OP wants to run containers - and in that case, musl doesn't matter. And for running programs natively, many are available as packages (with any musl incompatibilities already resolved). But yeah, if you venture outside these limits, you can definitely run into issues with musl.