Posted November 6, 2023
I’ve been a Void Linux user for about 2 years and I want to say it has been a good run. Void Linux has been an absolutely great Linux distribution and has served me well for quite a while. However, every Linux distribution is not without it’s shortcomings. Although Void Linux is a great distribution, I still think that it had a few shortcomings that Alpine Linux fixes.
Although the main Void Linux repositories have more packages than most other distributions, the selection is still a bit…lacking. As of writing this, Void Linux has around 13,369 packages. Which is still a lot of packages, however Alpine Linux more than doubles Void at around 28,583 packages1.
One thing that bugs me is that even though Void supports musl libc, not all 13,369 packages are available for musl. As you would have guessed, Alpine does not have this problem since musl is the default.
Another thing that kind of bugs me is how long it took for packages I submitted to Void’s package repos to get accepted. Some of my requests were never responded to and others were just forgotten about entirely. When submitting packages to Alpine’s packages repos my requests were almost answered the same day and 100% of my packages (so far) have been accepted into the testing branch.
Now don’t get me wrong, the XBPS package manager is great, however apk (Alpine’s package manager) is superior when compared to XBPS. For example, when updating my system after a month on Void it would take around 3-4 minutes to update using XBPS. Whenever I update after a month on Alpine it usually takes less than a minute!
A set of packages that show this perfectly are the texlive packages. The
time it takes to install an entire texlive distribution on disk is
notoriously long. Alpine’s apk installs texlive way faster than XBPS.
Not only that, but apk manages cached packages in a much better way than
XBPS, in my opinion.
I don’t think I will ever see a package manager as fast, light, and minimal as apk.
One thing that keeps Alpine small is instead of using the GNU Coreutils, Alpine uses the BusyBox Coreutils. For a long time user of the GNU Coreutils like me, the switch can be very jarring, however the payoff is (in my opinion) worth it. The BusyBox Coreutils are actually easier to learn since they have less features and options. They also have the upside of being more POSIX compliant than the GNU Coreutils so writing scripts with BusyBox usually results in more portability.
Void and Alpine both support musl libc, but a major difference is that Alpine supports only musl2. For those of you who are not well versed in C libraries, musl is essentially a smaller and more tidy C library replacement for glibc (the GNU C library). As I mentioned above, this means that all 28,583 Alpine packages are compiled for musl.
For reasons that I won’t get into (since it would take too long) musl is generally better than glibc, but sometimes isn’t as compatible as glibc, you can find out more about that here. I think one of the best comparisons of musl and glibc can be found here. musl binaries tend to be smaller, faster, and more portable compared to glibc.
As a C programmer, working with musl is a dream compared to glibc.
Overall, Alpine Linux fixes almost every gripe that I had with Void Linux and also fixes problems that I didn’t even know I had. The entire Alpine Linux distribution is easy to understand, simple, and fast. There are many, many more things that Alpine does better than Void, but if I listed them all then it would take forever. But so far, Alpine Linux is probably one of the best Linux distributions that I have ever used.