KDE is so heavy, though! I wonder if you could use XFWM or Fluxbox instead. I can use Fluxbox on the systemd -free OS called antiX (base version is very light!) and it is extremely fast and light even in a VM or on a 2.0 flash drive.
@@genkiferal7178 I am using XFCE on Alpine, and everything works just like any other Linux desktop like Ubuntu. The problem of Alpine is that most apps are not binary-compatible. If something doesn't exist in the official repo, you would have to build it yourself, which takes a loooooot of time. It won't work like other Linux where you could just download a Linux binary from an official website (e.g., Blender) and run it directly.
absolutely love alpine, i have an alpine VM running gitolite and it gives me a great place to store my git repositories using literally 70MB of RAM. crazy.
You inspired me. I moved the VM that hosts many of my docker containers from Ubuntu (server) to Apline. Since all I ran on there was a single docker-compose stack (about eight unrelated containers), it was pretty easy to tar things move and move them to the new VM. A bit of DHCP re-configuration in pfsense and I'm back up under Alpine pretty quickly. The biggest headache I had was getting the user and group ID's correct on the Alpine machine. I'll consider Alpine first for my VMs in the future.
there are docs on everything you might want to use that requires "user scripts", Alpine has been around for a looong time. 2 main reasons why Alpine is "sooo lite" 1 it does not use GLibC, it uses Musl LibC (which makes it "lite on memory"), and 2 it does not use SystemD (which makes it "lite on disk"). FYI Musl and Alpine are developed by the guys that created (and still maintain) OWL (OpenWall Linux), which can install itself on a VM, has "per user security" (which only a couple of other OS's use optionally), and runs without "system bit" (the +s attribute) usage
I was curious but didn't find Owl Linux on youtube. I searched for Owl Linux and also Owl Openwall Linux but I don't think I saw it. Oh well maybe it'll show up sometime.
@@manemobiili I guess I have been building software on linux for too long. You _can_ build BusyBox with GLibC, but that is _not_ the case on Alpine. BTW I prefer ToyBox over BusyBox ..
I believe you can cut even more resources usage by running Alpine on LXC instead of a VM, it should behave the same and share a lot of resources with the Proxmox underlying machine. Thank you for the video, great channel.
There are definitely limitations on what you can do in docker inside of an LXC container tho, unfortunately. Just try and get guacamole running in an LXC using docker while using a GPU to speed it all up (docker is/was basically the only way to get it working inside of the newer Ubuntu releases when i last checked a month or 2 ago). But PLEASE prove me wrong and show me where I went wrong provisioning a privileged container in LXC with access to my GPU in order to get Ubuntu Server to run Guacamole. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I have doubts doing this in alpine lxc would be any different.
For my Proxmox VM's i am using DietPi OS Proxmox Version. Blank install with nothing in it uses 60mb RAM and 650mb of storage. DietPi Initial Setup process takes about 45 - 50 sec. depends how fast you can type and select stuff on the screen :) As i done a lot of them i can setup dietpi from scratch in less than 1 min. Blank install restarts in 10 - 12 sec.
@@MRPtech Sounds like Alpine containers are perfect to run on my Proxmox pi4. It's going to take some time learning Alpine though. apk is nice but it's not going to do everything apt did either
@@DaveHoltzman Yes. If you really short on RAM, alpine wil be a great choice. Done a bit more testing. Pihole inside Ubuntu container uses about 55 - 60mb RAM. same docker container inside Alpine LXC - 45mb it is less than ubuntu but still i will keep pihole inside ubuntu lxc just because APT simplicity
@@MRPtech nice to hear your thinking pretty much the same thing I am. that install script for x86 docker was so good man. I wanna spend some time researching what other alpine install scripts may be out there.
I've installed Alpine Linux past month in my machine as desktop with KDE plasma and awesome window manager and i used edge repos on edge repos there is latest kernel version you'll find version 6 And have latest packages version i had all that + i played ps2 games using pcsx2 and it's possible to to play psp games using ppsspp and retro games using retroarch i I've installed many packages like gimp and blenderand inkscape and darktable all of them worked well Alpine is a good choice for using Linux with less resource and Alpine Linux it's a security distro
Thanks for this. I was trying to get Alpine running in an LXC to run things like MQTT with minimal resources. I used to use Docker, but wanted to transition to LXC and needed a reminder of the Alpine commands. The Debian LXC is so big compared to Alpine. No more bloat.
I love Alpine. I've used it as a touchscreen kiosk before and also for Kubernetes nodes. Both are excellent use cases as you don't want the underlying OS taking resources from the app you want to run.
I've made the switch a short while ago. Sometimes I stumble into compatibility issues with the fact that the standard library isn't glib but it's a great distro for desktop. Hope it gets more traction
If this happens, search the Alpine forum and mailing list for the software you are tying to compile, someone has usually already produced patches (if its not in the Community Repo)
I use PostmarketOS on my Pinephone & Pinephone Pro. PMOS is based off of Alpine. I love it so much I think I will install Alpine with Sway on my main computer.
Suggest you to read a bit more about alpine deployment modes. The "sys", "data" and rest options are actually having substantial differences. You picked the right one just by chance :)
In vi, if you want to delete a character at the current cursor position, rather just hit "x" instead of hitting "i", delete key and esc key. 3 strokes are just too many to delete one character.
Great video. I just did a test install on Proxmox of both Ubuntu server and Alpine. For Ubuntu, I chose the minimal install. I installed Docker and Docker Compose on both. Alpine is currently using less than half the RAM that the minimal Ubuntu server is. I may start running Alpine for all my servers here at home. I'm going to test further setting Alpine up as an lxc as others here in the comments mentioned.
2 days ago I installed Alpine linux through Termux Qemu onto my Oculus Quest to run Docker and it worked well enough be it slowly. I wouldn't want to waste my time doing the configs directly on the quest itself cause its slow but to just boot it up in 4 minutes and have my dockers ready onboard my Meta Quest 2 VR headset is cool. I closely watched the Samsung Dex Community for a while so I picked up on some of their methods.
Have you looked into the Ox64 yet? It's like a hybrid between a Pi Pico and a Pi Zero W. You can do embedded microcontroller tasks with it, or you can run linux even!
Instead of going into interactive mode with i and then deleting a character with backspace you can press x in non-interactive mode to delete a character in vi.
If you *need* LibreOffice, fine. But, for 90% of my own files that only I access, markdown/.md files are soooo much easier and lighter/smaller. Geany might not be my favorite editor, but of all the markdown editors I own, it opens the fastest. MarkText, because of its regex capabilities, though, is also a favorite. LibreOffice is a tank - big and slow.
Desolé de ne répondre que 9 mois plus tard. C'était [escape] :wq [enter] Le caractère : se dit "colon" en anglais. Quand tu es dans l'éditeur de texte Vim escape te permet de sortir du mode "insert" dans lequel tu édites le document. Puis : indique que tu vas entrer une commabde. wq (write/quit) indique que tu veux sauvegarder et quitter le document.
Hey Don, great video! I switched from Linux Mint to Alpine on my laptop and now will start using it as my daily driver OS. I also installed the xfce desktop and it works very well, at idle only 230MB RAM used! Keep those awesome videos coming. 😁
So with linux, is it possible to have one device like this running apps, and another with a GUI that you sit behind and use the apps on the console based one? So some kind of server client architecture.
Yes of course. You can use a browser based app, or if the remote system has X-Windows you can run the app on the "host" system and the display is sent to the remote. There are videos on doing diskless nodes and VDI solutions with proxmox/linux
I actually used alpine for a while on an ancient dell vostro laptop, and man its absolutely lightweight there were some bugs with kde and some missing stuff that time
nice video, this is super interesting, i was looking for a lite linux version for proxmox, it's for installing docker on a raspberry pi, i never use distro that dont use "apt" but if i just need to install docker that should be fine edit: i have install alpine on proxmox as Container Template (raspberryPi4), i'm impressed alpine CT : storage used : 105mo RAM : 7mo CPU : 7-10% debian CT: storage used : 492mo RAM : 23mo CPU: 7-20% thx
I want to use a very basic mini tower PC as a file server and possibly run a couple little things like a (very small) sql server and things like that. What distro would you recommend to have a good balance between ease of use, power consumption, etc? I know my way around linux a bit but I'm not the ultimate linux tech. I am used to Ubuntu Desktop and Ubuntu Server a bit... What distro would you recommend?
If you are only after minimal RAM footprint and do not want to go all stone age with base toolkit, than plain Debian is a lot better compared to something fat like Ubuntu (better on storage too)
Yea I do prefer Debian over Alpine. They both have equal weight when it comes to RAM footprint. I suppose if you really hated systemd or you want an easy out of the box setup for running OS in ram then alpine makes all of that a lot easier to setup.
TBF I suspect a large chunk of the ubuntu install was the swap file, while your alpine its own swap partition. In both cases it's space you can't use, but you didn't count it when showing the fs usage on alpine
i love antiX base. it needs a lot of work, but if i was rich, i'd think it was a great investment. the main problem is getting it to install on bare metal and to get the persistence set up if using a flash drive or VM. It is sooooo much faster than Debian XFCE or even Debian XFWM. But, Alpine OS looks even harder to configure and/or install. I think the linux community needs to re-think their loyalty to systemd.
Well, I've heard of Alpine Linux since years now but never tried it out. But oh boy that's crazy, I'm gonna try to migrate as much Debian VMs as possible to Alpine Linux. :D
A bit strange how come 4 cores 4 threads ended up in Proxmox showing 8 CPUs. Do they just blindly sum everything up they find? They should have added +1 for hdd and +2 for two memory sticks then...
DEBIAN minimal netinstall will give you similar light weight install. Only around 15 threads will be running at boot with around 50MB ~100MB memory consumption. Boots quick ! I use this to run many of my applications on old hardware.
DEBIAN minimal netinstall needs better documentation. I tried a few times and always had WiFi problems. Had to install using using ethernet and then move the entire heavy, bulky computer back to my bedroom later. What DE or WM did you install on it and did you test a few to compare speed or resources used?
Thank you for this!! I completely forgot this distro... 😖 and it seems it also contains the packages I like (much of them rust based - on the edge branch) and has support for armv7 architecture! So it's time to dust off some older SBC's I have laying around... 😇
It's great, but it can't beat a debian LXC, not sure why you would use a VM, unless you want to host a docker container, which is just painful with LXC.
I would love to switch to Alpine but I'm not going to erase my HD for it. There doesn't seem to be a way to install on an existing partition on a physical drive. setup -disk never boots. Anyone know of a tutorial to do this that shows how to install to HD alongside other OS?
Back in the days I used Slitaz. When in openbox mode, archbang style with tint2 and such, it booted at 28 mb. The default lxde environment booted around 47 mb. The iso itself was weeeell under 100 mb. Blazing fast. Pitty it was discontinued. That being said, I've ran debian nets/openbox since 2005-ish. They all booted around 70mb.
@@dinozaurpickupline4221 That's 2015-ish. Debian is still going strong. I was talking about Greaves, the original pappermint guy. If I recall, he did up to version 10. Anywho, I believe Slitaz, back in the days, was busybox based as well. Could be wrong though.
not sure why but installing docker for eaxample takes ages. besides having i5 12gen 12 threads on proxmox. should be hella fast. i installed alpine same as you did, only difference i did 2gb disk space. 1gb ram. 2 cores. if i monitor resources its not using alot of cpu or ram. nothing. i changed dns to google. 8888 and 8484 but everything seems slow. downloading / installing. any idea? The host is plugged in on cat6 ethernet cable. i got 1000mbit. it has static ip also tried changing host to same dns of google namesvers Edit: i disabled firewall at network setting of the VM and now its fast...
I am hoping for something similar. Klaus Schwab has warned of the electrical grid going down and a pi or something almost as tiny can run off of portable solar panels. My Raspberry Pi is also small enough to not be a nuisance - uses no desk space and I should be able to travel easily with it.
Love your videos man. I have started self-hosting after watching one of your videos. I have been struggling to setup SSL Certificates for all my docket containers. Any help is appreciated.
Use a reverse proxy which uses letsencrypt. Nginx Proxy Manager is probably the easiest. Personally I've used traefik but honestly I can't really recommend it.
you can run them together, and it depends on what you are trying to do. If you want a full server with many services LXC, if you want _parts_ of a server, Docker is fine. And the there is there is "I need to record ..." data question too .. one is not better that the other, except for explicit senarios
I use alpine Docker images all the time, but I have to say I don't really see the point when running a Docker host, and there's a bunch if gotchas if you're using it for something else. I mean, Ubuntu is just incredibly bloated, not many Linux eat so much storage by default. And when it comes to memory usage, well, you were not showing a LARGE difference when you consider running numerous Docker containers on there. Docker containers also need RAM, and in the end you've got a RAM issue when you're using all your available RAM. With a 8GB server that means that the difference between Ubuntu and alpine in RAM usage is neglegable. Also, frankly, even if there's a lot of people hating it, I really like systemd. And alpine is using another init system - openrc -, as you demonstrated, and I'm too lazy to learn advanced usage of it / or it's not even providing the features of systemd I'd like to use. Then there's the fact that alpine doesn't use glibc but musl. I do like the idea of musl, but you're not making things easy for yourself with that setup, most executables won't run and you'll have to hope that eg gcompat can fix it. Often there's a lot of other libraries that your regular "fat" - though significantly slimmer than Ubuntu - installation will have present but are missing in alpine, in that case you'll have to know the right tools to analyze the binary and based on that find the right package to install. All thar stuff ain't easy and I doubt that that tradeoff is worth it for most people. You went from one extrem to the other, but inbetween is the sweet spot IMO.
@@terrayi a few points. You did not put your arguments precisely so it could be that I misunderstood you. I did not advocate for Ubuntu Docker images. For starters I did not advocate for Ubuntu at all, but I also would still prefer alpine images for Docker containers. I said that for home users it's not sensible to use Alpine - or for that matter other slim Docker OS - as a docker HOST. Also, on a technical standpoint, Ubuntu in many cases isn't THAT bad as a docker image base. 2 reasons: Docker layer caching /reuse and also that Docker containers typically only run single process. This means that if you've got a few images running on the same Ubuntu base, all the ones after the first will not incur any download or storage overhead. In fact, if you're running a few services that use libraries not present in alpine but in Ubuntu it's conceivable that you'll download and store MORE with alpine as for technical reasons (incompatible layers etc) these libraries might be downloaded multiple times. And when you're running stuff in these containers, it's the only process, so the memory usage increase of Ubuntu might not be present too. A reminder. I'm not saying that one should use Ubuntu, I'm just saying that it's more complicated than that, and also, more importantly, I don't think that the reasoning about alpine as base image or about these purpose build Docker hosts for large enterprises is at all applicable to the home user.
@@9SMTM6 downloading is only a small factor when it comes to enterprise microservice architecture. When there are large visitors to the service in real production, memory usage, disk usage as well as launch time or boot time matter. AWS, GCP etc charges you for compute time which includes launch time as well as allocated memory etc. Even for home usage, who would like to wait longer? Maybe you but not me. I hated Ubuntu from more than a decade ago because of the bloat even for desktop use. It is now even larger than before. Yuck. Alpine is more than good enough distro for docker host. I'd actually highly recommend to build system running most apps using docker and kvm and leave core system as minimal as possible if you want a secure environment.
Could you explain why you prefer Alpine over antiX? I love the latter, but it seems almost as difficult to set up as Alpine seems. I use Fluxbox-ZZZ with antiX base version. I want to try Alpine, though. What DE or WM are you using and why - compared to what else you tried...? Your experience might save me a ton of time!
@@NovaspiritTech Haha we all been there at some point, would be good seeing a video of you searching for a new keyboard maybe an old model from dell, lenovo or ibm m(?) or just some regular new mech keyboard. Love the explanation of alpine linux ima try it out in my rig for small projects, thanks for the video 👍
I've been using alpine for awhile, and most of my Dockerfiles have all been built on alpine unless required or specified otherwise Its so lightweight, and half the time, the operation steps to setup, say a Samba server, is half that of debian
Nice video. You can get used Dell T5600 with dual Xeons really cheap. Memory is cheap too. Mine has 72GB RAM 2x Xenos 6 cores and HT each. I added two PCIe NVMe cards for mirrored ZFS storage. Or go with T5810 for up to 256GB RAM. haha They are quiet too.
cant wait for your next video: "Guys I had to spend hours installing all the useful packages and utils, then I had to configure them for a few hours, then It took up 62Gb and took 2 minutes to boot, so I am switching back to Ubuntu server!" 🤣🤣🤣🤣
I'm sorry dude, but you're running containers, not dockers. Docker is not the only way to run containers, and in my opinion it's not even the best way.
I've used both alpine and debian and they are both about the same when it comes to being light weight. For the average user switching to debian is easier since there's a point of familiarity with apt and systemd. For the longest time I hated systemd and it's mostly why I had prefered alpine. Now that I'm comfortable with systemd, seems that debian is a bit more stable with certain hardware (at least for me since I seem to have issues with my realtek nic randomly resetting on alpine).
i ran antiX (base version) on a cheap 2.0 flash drive and it did fine. antiX has no systemd. But, Debian XFCE (which i use on most everything) was unbearably sluggish on that same cheap flash drive. But, yes, learning a new DE/WM such as Fluxbox and also learning a new way to install was a pain int he arse. I could use AppImages on antiX, though, and that always helps.
This video is just a week too late. I accomplished what you did by piecing the instructions together. Now I can just save this and not transcribe my chicken scratch notes
7:02 ubuntu xD well its not same. install everything same as that ubuntu it will same big lol. so whats debian smallest core. only everything to boot bash. it could be stripped even more AND when you learn make it your self. you not need any distros. distros are killing linux. distros should be just wallpaper. 3% linux desktop use. thats like nothing. nobody actually use linux. its just test machine lol that not boot after update. windows problem can fix linux problem mean reinstall. and minimal debian use 11mb
its not matter every 6 month its like win10->win11 on linux world. why is linux desktop 3%. there is too many distros or they actually suck. and suck just bcoz too many of them. and they are all same. same packages. minimum wallpaper change(distro)
Pal, Linux (any of it's flavors and distros) is a toy for nerds and geeks. a serious person, looking to use their pc like a normal human being has no time to be testing the weekly distro. no thanks. talk to us again when all the nerd developers could get to some agreement and release something polished, stable, coherent and usable. this is the reason you will never get more than 2 percent of market share.
Android, routers, servers... Are you saying they are not serious? Not all Linux users test distros weekly or even monthly. You have biased stereotype on Linux users.
I have been using Alpine Linux as my desktop daily driver with KDE for about 3 months now. So, far so good. I think you are on to something good here.
please shed light on your configuration & use case as desktop,web experience & hardware you running,thankyou
KDE is so heavy, though! I wonder if you could use XFWM or Fluxbox instead.
I can use Fluxbox on the systemd -free OS called antiX (base version is very light!) and it is extremely fast and light even in a VM or on a 2.0 flash drive.
Wow I see you in every linux channel I watch x)
@@genkiferal7178 I am using XFCE on Alpine, and everything works just like any other Linux desktop like Ubuntu. The problem of Alpine is that most apps are not binary-compatible. If something doesn't exist in the official repo, you would have to build it yourself, which takes a loooooot of time. It won't work like other Linux where you could just download a Linux binary from an official website (e.g., Blender) and run it directly.
@@genkiferal7178 Why use XFWM when you can have FVWM! Just kidding, I'm using XFCE too.
absolutely love alpine, i have an alpine VM running gitolite and it gives me a great place to store my git repositories using literally 70MB of RAM. crazy.
If I remember rightly, a lot of docker environments are based on Alpine.
I've exclusively seen Alpine used in Docker. I didn't even know you could get commodity hardware support within Alpine. Cool!
You inspired me. I moved the VM that hosts many of my docker containers from Ubuntu (server) to Apline. Since all I ran on there was a single docker-compose stack (about eight unrelated containers), it was pretty easy to tar things move and move them to the new VM. A bit of DHCP re-configuration in pfsense and I'm back up under Alpine pretty quickly. The biggest headache I had was getting the user and group ID's correct on the Alpine machine. I'll consider Alpine first for my VMs in the future.
there are docs on everything you might want to use that requires "user scripts", Alpine has been around for a looong time. 2 main reasons why Alpine is "sooo lite" 1 it does not use GLibC, it uses Musl LibC (which makes it "lite on memory"), and 2 it does not use SystemD (which makes it "lite on disk"). FYI Musl and Alpine are developed by the guys that created (and still maintain) OWL (OpenWall Linux), which can install itself on a VM, has "per user security" (which only a couple of other OS's use optionally), and runs without "system bit" (the +s attribute) usage
Great info, thanks for taking the time. ☮️❤️🌈
I was curious but didn't find Owl Linux on youtube. I searched for Owl Linux and also Owl Openwall Linux but I don't think I saw it. Oh well maybe it'll show up sometime.
Don't forget about Busybox which replaces GNU userspace utilities.
It's LINUX not GNU/LINUX
Dont musl only supports 32bit? Like void is?
@@manemobiili I guess I have been building software on linux for too long. You _can_ build BusyBox with GLibC, but that is _not_ the case on Alpine. BTW I prefer ToyBox over BusyBox ..
I believe you can cut even more resources usage by running Alpine on LXC instead of a VM, it should behave the same and share a lot of resources with the Proxmox underlying machine. Thank you for the video, great channel.
You can combine LXC & Docker
@@paulwratt yes, run docker/portainer on top of the LXC alpine, for maximum resource sharing.
There are definitely limitations on what you can do in docker inside of an LXC container tho, unfortunately.
Just try and get guacamole running in an LXC using docker while using a GPU to speed it all up (docker is/was basically the only way to get it working inside of the newer Ubuntu releases when i last checked a month or 2 ago). But PLEASE prove me wrong and show me where I went wrong provisioning a privileged container in LXC with access to my GPU in order to get Ubuntu Server to run Guacamole. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I have doubts doing this in alpine lxc would be any different.
@@iknowsolittle I recently tried to install Guacamole in a LXC and it was annoying. I think my LXC is now privileged, but works
th-cam.com/video/n2DyeLOu3bA/w-d-xo.html
1 user said he has problem with LXC+Docker. better use VM+Docker
For my Proxmox VM's i am using DietPi OS Proxmox Version.
Blank install with nothing in it uses 60mb RAM and 650mb of storage.
DietPi Initial Setup process takes about 45 - 50 sec. depends how fast you can type and select stuff on the screen :) As i done a lot of them i can setup dietpi from scratch in less than 1 min.
Blank install restarts in 10 - 12 sec.
I saw your Video 2 days ago and now here you are. So wonderful I love the videos you put out.. Thank You
Fun fakt : Alpine CT container on Proxmox use < 20mb in blank run. This is super amazing to discover.
@@MRPtech Sounds like Alpine containers are perfect to run on my Proxmox pi4. It's going to take some time learning Alpine though. apk is nice but it's not going to do everything apt did either
@@DaveHoltzman Yes. If you really short on RAM, alpine wil be a great choice. Done a bit more testing. Pihole inside Ubuntu container uses about 55 - 60mb RAM. same docker container inside Alpine LXC - 45mb
it is less than ubuntu but still i will keep pihole inside ubuntu lxc just because APT simplicity
@@MRPtech nice to hear your thinking pretty much the same thing I am. that install script for x86 docker was so good man. I wanna spend some time researching what other alpine install scripts may be out there.
I've installed Alpine Linux past month in my machine as desktop with KDE plasma and awesome window manager
and i used edge repos
on edge repos there is latest kernel version you'll find version 6
And have latest packages version
i had all that + i played ps2 games using pcsx2 and it's possible to to play psp games using ppsspp and retro games using retroarch
i I've installed many packages like gimp and blenderand inkscape and darktable all of them worked well
Alpine is a good choice for using Linux with less resource and Alpine Linux it's a security distro
Thanks for this. I was trying to get Alpine running in an LXC to run things like MQTT with minimal resources. I used to use Docker, but wanted to transition to LXC and needed a reminder of the Alpine commands. The Debian LXC is so big compared to Alpine. No more bloat.
I love Alpine. I've used it as a touchscreen kiosk before and also for Kubernetes nodes. Both are excellent use cases as you don't want the underlying OS taking resources from the app you want to run.
Why not just use a LXC CT if it seems the only issue you have is resource limitations?
LXC CT is a game changer on proxmox
@@rodrigosmmiguel what if you _dont_ want or _dont_ need a full OS?
I've made the switch a short while ago. Sometimes I stumble into compatibility issues with the fact that the standard library isn't glib but it's a great distro for desktop. Hope it gets more traction
If this happens, search the Alpine forum and mailing list for the software you are tying to compile, someone has usually already produced patches (if its not in the Community Repo)
Good stuff. DSL damn small Linux back in the 2000s had a full GUI that ran on old hardware with 256 MB of ram.
I use PostmarketOS on my Pinephone & Pinephone Pro. PMOS is based off of Alpine. I love it so much I think I will install Alpine with Sway on my main computer.
Suggest you to read a bit more about alpine deployment modes. The "sys", "data" and rest options are actually having substantial differences. You picked the right one just by chance :)
In vi, if you want to delete a character at the current cursor position, rather just hit "x" instead of hitting "i", delete key and esc key. 3 strokes are just too many to delete one character.
I use Arch btw
The only place I've seen Alpine used is in Docker. I didn't even know you could get commodity hardware support within Alpine. Cool! ☮️❤️🌈
Yes, there is even Bare Metal Alpine for RPi - most hosting services offer Alpine, not just on VM/Containers
Why haven't you used the alpine virtual edition that is optimized to run on virtualized hardware ?
That’s what I use. Runs so so light
Great video. I just did a test install on Proxmox of both Ubuntu server and Alpine. For Ubuntu, I chose the minimal install. I installed Docker and Docker Compose on both. Alpine is currently using less than half the RAM that the minimal Ubuntu server is. I may start running Alpine for all my servers here at home. I'm going to test further setting Alpine up as an lxc as others here in the comments mentioned.
I now have a Minecraft server running in an Alpine container on Proxmox and it's working perfectly.
Thank you for a nice intro to Alpine
I plan to test this as a Kubernetes K3S Node server in my proxmox
Thanks for the video. I've been wanting to try out Alpine and Rocky Linux.
2 days ago I installed Alpine linux through Termux Qemu onto my Oculus Quest to run Docker and it worked well enough be it slowly. I wouldn't want to waste my time doing the configs directly on the quest itself cause its slow but to just boot it up in 4 minutes and have my dockers ready onboard my Meta Quest 2 VR headset is cool. I closely watched the Samsung Dex Community for a while so I picked up on some of their methods.
wow on a quest vr headset!?!
@@NovaspiritTech Yes. You've got a quest 2 right? Qemu works pretty decent on it. It's worth some play time.
MRP did a video a while ago and I followed all the steps here but I used a VR headset instead..
th-cam.com/video/IthUo9zVfmg/w-d-xo.html
That was not a sentence I expected to read today
Have you looked into the Ox64 yet? It's like a hybrid between a Pi Pico and a Pi Zero W. You can do embedded microcontroller tasks with it, or you can run linux even!
how does alpine run in comparison to diet pi?
Instead of going into interactive mode with i and then deleting a character with backspace you can press x in non-interactive mode to delete a character in vi.
Would be great if you showed us how to get XFCE up and running and standard desktop apps like LibreOffice etc.
i'm up for that
@@NovaspiritTech Thanks! :D It'd help a lot. I'm not that skilled outside GUI's :s
@@NovaspiritTech I second this. A video on how to set up Alpine as your daily driver would be interesting.
If you *need* LibreOffice, fine. But, for 90% of my own files that only I access, markdown/.md files are soooo much easier and lighter/smaller. Geany might not be my favorite editor, but of all the markdown editors I own, it opens the fastest. MarkText, because of its regex capabilities, though, is also a favorite. LibreOffice is a tank - big and slow.
This is so interesting, I've been using alpine with docker but never really though of installing it directly on the server
Thank you for the info!
Have you compared it against turnkey solution in resources?
Great demo, thank you!
Stage 1: Don introduces new things to us. Stage 2: We bang our heads on stackoverflow
this is the truest thing i ever heard
7:50 i'm french, so i didn't understand what you said after escape, and youtube subtitles not understand, please help me!
Desolé de ne répondre que 9 mois plus tard.
C'était [escape] :wq [enter]
Le caractère : se dit "colon" en anglais.
Quand tu es dans l'éditeur de texte Vim escape te permet de sortir du mode "insert" dans lequel tu édites le document. Puis : indique que tu vas entrer une commabde. wq (write/quit) indique que tu veux sauvegarder et quitter le document.
@@themroc8231 hah merci en tout cas
Hey Don, great video! I switched from Linux Mint to Alpine on my laptop and now will start using it as my daily driver OS. I also installed the xfce desktop and it works very well, at idle only 230MB RAM used! Keep those awesome videos coming. 😁
With the memory saved you can now open one more tab in the browser cause it's the web that eats so much RAM XD
I've been using Debian instead of Ubuntu for the last month, but I will try Alpine. Maybe even put it on bare metal and see how it behaves. 🎉
on what os are you running Wazuh ?
Have you tried using ubuntu core ?
its stripped down but still _thicc_
So with linux, is it possible to have one device like this running apps, and another with a GUI that you sit behind and use the apps on the console based one? So some kind of server client architecture.
Yes of course. You can use a browser based app, or if the remote system has X-Windows you can run the app on the "host" system and the display is sent to the remote. There are videos on doing diskless nodes and VDI solutions with proxmox/linux
Great video - very informative!! Also - you type very quickly ⌨. You should do mechanical keyboard reviews 😄
"it's gonna f- install it"
i love that it's gonna f- install it just like that.
I actually used alpine for a while on an ancient dell vostro laptop, and man its absolutely lightweight
there were some bugs with kde and some missing stuff that time
KDE is a bug and sooo heavy, so KDE is probably half of your problem.
@@genkiferal7178 no, I have used kde before, and on arch, kde had far lesser bugs...actually kde on a musl based distro is a bad idea
@@drishalballaney Cuz musl is anaemic, it lacks a lot of stuff needed for other software to work
nice video,
this is super interesting, i was looking for a lite linux version for proxmox, it's for installing docker on a raspberry pi, i never use distro that dont use "apt"
but if i just need to install docker that should be fine
edit: i have install alpine on proxmox as Container Template (raspberryPi4), i'm impressed
alpine CT :
storage used : 105mo
RAM : 7mo
CPU : 7-10%
debian CT:
storage used : 492mo
RAM : 23mo
CPU: 7-20%
thx
Will be switching to FreeBSD as Bhyve finally support hardware accelerated GPU passthrough on Windows Virtual Machines.
I want to use a very basic mini tower PC as a file server and possibly run a couple little things like a (very small) sql server and things like that. What distro would you recommend to have a good balance between ease of use, power consumption, etc? I know my way around linux a bit but I'm not the ultimate linux tech. I am used to Ubuntu Desktop and Ubuntu Server a bit...
What distro would you recommend?
Alpine is very nice. You can have it automatically select the fastest mirrors by selecting "f" in the setup.
Yay to Linus for _removing_ console scroll-back, _and_ the guy that got it re-instated
If you are only after minimal RAM footprint and do not want to go all stone age with base toolkit, than plain Debian is a lot better compared to something fat like Ubuntu (better on storage too)
Yea I do prefer Debian over Alpine. They both have equal weight when it comes to RAM footprint. I suppose if you really hated systemd or you want an easy out of the box setup for running OS in ram then alpine makes all of that a lot easier to setup.
which debian you using?
TBF I suspect a large chunk of the ubuntu install was the swap file, while your alpine its own swap partition. In both cases it's space you can't use, but you didn't count it when showing the fs usage on alpine
Most impressive. For a low resource desktop, I've been running AntiX.
i love antiX base. it needs a lot of work, but if i was rich, i'd think it was a great investment. the main problem is getting it to install on bare metal and to get the persistence set up if using a flash drive or VM. It is sooooo much faster than Debian XFCE or even Debian XFWM.
But, Alpine OS looks even harder to configure and/or install.
I think the linux community needs to re-think their loyalty to systemd.
Well, I've heard of Alpine Linux since years now but never tried it out. But oh boy that's crazy, I'm gonna try to migrate as much Debian VMs as possible to Alpine Linux. :D
Been playing about with getting this on hardware, but all troubleshooting guides are biased towards docker. Very frustrating!
A bit strange how come 4 cores 4 threads ended up in Proxmox showing 8 CPUs. Do they just blindly sum everything up they find? They should have added +1 for hdd and +2 for two memory sticks then...
Interested to see what resources opensuse microos use in comparison to the alpine setup.
Thanks for the video.
Alpine will still be smaller, especially if there is a desktop involved (BTW there is a good video of setup and using microos on RPi)
Why -standard and not -virt? It's literally designed to be run in virtualized environments.
I would love it if the Ox64 took off like the pico as it is afaster, and has an Open ISA RISC-V
what's the point if os with lower disk space if you cpu can't handle the taks in the end when you start loading the VM's
7:51 WHat the heck does 'EX-Cape' mean? :)
DEBIAN minimal netinstall will give you similar light weight install. Only around 15 threads will be running at boot with around 50MB ~100MB memory consumption. Boots quick !
I use this to run many of my applications on old hardware.
DEBIAN minimal netinstall needs better documentation. I tried a few times and always had WiFi problems. Had to install using using ethernet and then move the entire heavy, bulky computer back to my bedroom later. What DE or WM did you install on it and did you test a few to compare speed or resources used?
Could you make a tutorial on how to create NFS shares between alpine VM? losing my mind over here...
Hi Don
setup alpine does not run
Is there another way to get this to work ?
setup-alpine
Bare Metal alpine with the ability to run containers/VM is not that hard to setup, and the great thing is that you learn a ton in the process.
Don’t u ever get tiered from distro hoping?
Tired of hoping to stop hopping from assorted tiers!
Thank you for this!!
I completely forgot this distro... 😖 and it seems it also contains the packages I like (much of them rust based - on the edge branch) and has support for armv7 architecture! So it's time to dust off some older SBC's I have laying around... 😇
OpenRC is the goat man. Systemd is main issue with Ubuntu server
It's great, but it can't beat a debian LXC, not sure why you would use a VM, unless you want to host a docker container, which is just painful with LXC.
The command "top", already part of bash, does almost everything "htop" does.
yeah, but harder to read without the syntax highlighting. top should fix that small issue.
I would love to switch to Alpine but I'm not going to erase my HD for it. There doesn't seem to be a way to install on an existing partition on a physical drive. setup -disk never boots. Anyone know of a tutorial to do this that shows how to install to HD alongside other OS?
Back in the days I used Slitaz. When in openbox mode, archbang style with tint2 and such, it booted at 28 mb. The default lxde environment booted around 47 mb. The iso itself was weeeell under 100 mb. Blazing fast. Pitty it was discontinued. That being said, I've ran debian nets/openbox since 2005-ish. They all booted around 70mb.
debian's creator is dead,who's now taking on deb?
@@dinozaurpickupline4221 Debian's creator? You mean the original peppermint creator. No idea who's doing that nowadays.
@@johnmaletic898 Ian Murdoch
@@dinozaurpickupline4221 That's 2015-ish. Debian is still going strong. I was talking about Greaves, the original pappermint guy. If I recall, he did up to version 10. Anywho, I believe Slitaz, back in the days, was busybox based as well. Could be wrong though.
not sure why but installing docker for eaxample takes ages. besides having i5 12gen 12 threads on proxmox. should be hella fast. i installed alpine same as you did, only difference i did 2gb disk space. 1gb ram. 2 cores. if i monitor resources its not using alot of cpu or ram. nothing. i changed dns to google. 8888 and 8484 but everything seems slow. downloading / installing. any idea?
The host is plugged in on cat6 ethernet cable. i got 1000mbit. it has static ip also tried changing host to same dns of google namesvers
Edit: i disabled firewall at network setting of the VM and now its fast...
I use Alpine Linux on a Rasp Pi with Nginx reverse proxy and ddclient.
I am hoping for something similar. Klaus Schwab has warned of the electrical grid going down and a pi or something almost as tiny can run off of portable solar panels. My Raspberry Pi is also small enough to not be a nuisance - uses no desk space and I should be able to travel easily with it.
Love your videos man. I have started self-hosting after watching one of your videos.
I have been struggling to setup SSL Certificates for all my docket containers. Any help is appreciated.
Use a reverse proxy which uses letsencrypt.
Nginx Proxy Manager is probably the easiest. Personally I've used traefik but honestly I can't really recommend it.
I like dietpi so friendly try it ;) !!!
Does Alpine Linux run on the Raspberry Pi 4?
Nevermind. You answered my question at the end of your video. I'm pleased that Alpine Linux can run on the Raspberry Pi 4.
@@DerekMahar Can it run on a RP3 model B?
@@DerekMahar yes to both, check the website
how about you use LXC's, add some backup storage to Proxmox, you can easily use templates and pull them over when you need them. Much easier imo
you can run them together, and it depends on what you are trying to do. If you want a full server with many services LXC, if you want _parts_ of a server, Docker is fine. And the there is there is "I need to record ..." data question too .. one is not better that the other, except for explicit senarios
Interesting. I am looking for a replacement for buildroot, and this may be it...
hahah that was the same idea i had
Alpine rocks!
Most dockers I use are built on Alpine cos it's so small
I use alpine Docker images all the time, but I have to say I don't really see the point when running a Docker host, and there's a bunch if gotchas if you're using it for something else.
I mean, Ubuntu is just incredibly bloated, not many Linux eat so much storage by default.
And when it comes to memory usage, well, you were not showing a LARGE difference when you consider running numerous Docker containers on there. Docker containers also need RAM, and in the end you've got a RAM issue when you're using all your available RAM. With a 8GB server that means that the difference between Ubuntu and alpine in RAM usage is neglegable.
Also, frankly, even if there's a lot of people hating it, I really like systemd. And alpine is using another init system - openrc -, as you demonstrated, and I'm too lazy to learn advanced usage of it / or it's not even providing the features of systemd I'd like to use.
Then there's the fact that alpine doesn't use glibc but musl. I do like the idea of musl, but you're not making things easy for yourself with that setup, most executables won't run and you'll have to hope that eg gcompat can fix it. Often there's a lot of other libraries that your regular "fat" - though significantly slimmer than Ubuntu - installation will have present but are missing in alpine, in that case you'll have to know the right tools to analyze the binary and based on that find the right package to install.
All thar stuff ain't easy and I doubt that that tradeoff is worth it for most people.
You went from one extrem to the other, but inbetween is the sweet spot IMO.
In current microservice trend, basing ubunbu as base image is a no-no. too bloated and too slow. It may be ok for non critical home uses tho.
@@terrayi a few points. You did not put your arguments precisely so it could be that I misunderstood you.
I did not advocate for Ubuntu Docker images. For starters I did not advocate for Ubuntu at all, but I also would still prefer alpine images for Docker containers.
I said that for home users it's not sensible to use Alpine - or for that matter other slim Docker OS - as a docker HOST.
Also, on a technical standpoint, Ubuntu in many cases isn't THAT bad as a docker image base. 2 reasons: Docker layer caching /reuse and also that Docker containers typically only run single process. This means that if you've got a few images running on the same Ubuntu base, all the ones after the first will not incur any download or storage overhead. In fact, if you're running a few services that use libraries not present in alpine but in Ubuntu it's conceivable that you'll download and store MORE with alpine as for technical reasons (incompatible layers etc) these libraries might be downloaded multiple times. And when you're running stuff in these containers, it's the only process, so the memory usage increase of Ubuntu might not be present too.
A reminder. I'm not saying that one should use Ubuntu, I'm just saying that it's more complicated than that, and also, more importantly, I don't think that the reasoning about alpine as base image or about these purpose build Docker hosts for large enterprises is at all applicable to the home user.
@@9SMTM6 downloading is only a small factor when it comes to enterprise microservice architecture. When there are large visitors to the service in real production, memory usage, disk usage as well as launch time or boot time matter. AWS, GCP etc charges you for compute time which includes launch time as well as allocated memory etc. Even for home usage, who would like to wait longer? Maybe you but not me. I hated Ubuntu from more than a decade ago because of the bloat even for desktop use. It is now even larger than before. Yuck. Alpine is more than good enough distro for docker host. I'd actually highly recommend to build system running most apps using docker and kvm and leave core system as minimal as possible if you want a secure environment.
There are also antixLinux and DamnSmallLinux. They're tiny tiny. but Alphine is what I use.
Could you explain why you prefer Alpine over antiX? I love the latter, but it seems almost as difficult to set up as Alpine seems. I use Fluxbox-ZZZ with antiX base version.
I want to try Alpine, though. What DE or WM are you using and why - compared to what else you tried...? Your experience might save me a ton of time!
You could even run it as a Linux container without having all the overhead of a VM.
My dude why are you using a low profile membrane keyboard
trust me, i want to get rid of it too.... it's so old and half the buttons doesn't work right. hahah it's all i got for now
@@NovaspiritTech Haha we all been there at some point, would be good seeing a video of you searching for a new keyboard maybe an old model from dell, lenovo or ibm m(?) or just some regular new mech keyboard. Love the explanation of alpine linux ima try it out in my rig for small projects, thanks for the video 👍
I was able install alpine in UTM VM on my M1 Mac and with htop is only 69 MB of ram! BTW that startup looks like gentoo.
Flashbacks to System V and init
thank you. now i know how to exit vi editor.
I've been using alpine for awhile, and most of my Dockerfiles have all been built on alpine unless required or specified otherwise
Its so lightweight, and half the time, the operation steps to setup, say a Samba server, is half that of debian
alpine's perfect for a vdi desktop
Nice video. You can get used Dell T5600 with dual Xeons really cheap. Memory is cheap too. Mine has 72GB RAM 2x Xenos 6 cores and HT each. I added two PCIe NVMe cards for mirrored ZFS storage. Or go with T5810 for up to 256GB RAM. haha They are quiet too.
Idle power consumption?
@@Mr.Leeroy It's a full size tower but with two xeons and lots of memory it's not going to be a low idle power consumption solution.
@@donaldwilliams6821 I know, that's why I ask.
Interested in actual figures in case you measured.
@@Mr.Leeroy Sorry no. Looking online seems to be around 150W.
@@donaldwilliams6821 a Raspberry Pi uses about 15W
cant wait for your next video: "Guys I had to spend hours installing all the useful packages and utils, then I had to configure them for a few hours, then It took up 62Gb and took 2 minutes to boot, so I am switching back to Ubuntu server!" 🤣🤣🤣🤣
Best option is to literally build your own distro using Yocto or buildroot
Resources? Intel i7-11700F w/64 gig of RAM here. I'm good.
Shift+PgUp should scroll up
I'm sorry dude, but you're running containers, not dockers. Docker is not the only way to run containers, and in my opinion it's not even the best way.
I've got a bunch of podmans running alongside some LXCs.
..
Nice
I've used both alpine and debian and they are both about the same when it comes to being light weight. For the average user switching to debian is easier since there's a point of familiarity with apt and systemd. For the longest time I hated systemd and it's mostly why I had prefered alpine. Now that I'm comfortable with systemd, seems that debian is a bit more stable with certain hardware (at least for me since I seem to have issues with my realtek nic randomly resetting on alpine).
i ran antiX (base version) on a cheap 2.0 flash drive and it did fine. antiX has no systemd. But, Debian XFCE (which i use on most everything) was unbearably sluggish on that same cheap flash drive. But, yes, learning a new DE/WM such as Fluxbox and also learning a new way to install was a pain int he arse. I could use AppImages on antiX, though, and that always helps.
This video is just a week too late. I accomplished what you did by piecing the instructions together. Now I can just save this and not transcribe my chicken scratch notes
7:02 ubuntu xD well its not same. install everything same as that ubuntu it will same big lol. so whats debian smallest core. only everything to boot bash. it could be stripped even more AND when you learn make it your self. you not need any distros. distros are killing linux. distros should be just wallpaper.
3% linux desktop use. thats like nothing. nobody actually use linux. its just test machine lol that not boot after update.
windows problem can fix linux problem mean reinstall.
and minimal debian use 11mb
Just run Arch.
its not matter every 6 month its like win10->win11 on linux world. why is linux desktop 3%. there is too many distros or they actually suck. and suck just bcoz too many of them. and they are all same. same packages. minimum wallpaper change(distro)
Nah, no glibc no Nvidia, no gaming probably as well
Pal, Linux (any of it's flavors and distros) is a toy for nerds and geeks. a serious person, looking to use their pc like a normal human being has no time to be testing the weekly distro. no thanks. talk to us again when all the nerd developers could get to some agreement and release something polished, stable, coherent and usable. this is the reason you will never get more than 2 percent of market share.
Android, routers, servers... Are you saying they are not serious? Not all Linux users test distros weekly or even monthly. You have biased stereotype on Linux users.
bsd is even more stingy
Is this similar to something like ANTIX???
antiX looks easier.
@@genkiferal7178 YEP..