Sage takes a spin of Alpine and contrasts it with antiX

Posted as comment by “sage” (we can correct this if you want a pseudo-name associated as editor) – we only replaced reddit with runit 🙂

Regarding Alpine linux.

On a whim, I gave alpine a try. I wanted to see if I could get a nice minimal desktop going similar to what Antix-23-runit has done on another (matching in specs) PC. It was rough going at first, but I was able to install the setup-xorg package and the herbstluftwm from their repos but could not get access to the xserver (most likely the elogind thing, which was not installed on the bare system).

I’ll spare the boring details, but it works really well now with some important notes. I had to grant the user not just the “wheel” group, but also “audio”, “video”, and “inputs” (pardon the details here, this install is on another machine). Also, the herbstluftwm package did NOT install bash, which is a startup requirement. The third, and final thing that finally got sound working was to put a statement in my .xinitrc file with two statements like (please forgive the details, I can check later from that machine):

/usr/libexec/pipewire-launcher
exec dbus-launch –sh-syntax –exit-with-session herbstluftwm

I got the details from these two posts:
https://teddit.pussthecat.org/r/Gentoo/comments/vp11hm/problems_with_pipewire_and_dbus
https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/PipeWire

I also installed the pipewire-alsa, etc. packages thinking they might be needed but it doesn’t appear to be used when checking htop.

I have to say, as a base that runs very tight so far. I ran a bunch of apps and newsboat for a day on it and after closing all the apps I was sitting at 205mb of ram (it booted to 190mb). I don’t notice a functional difference to the Antix-23 machine. I don’t have any seatd or elogind installed at all but I think it might have been not adding the user to the three groups (audio, video, inputs) that made things work. Not sure if any of these deamons are necessary … unless being in such groups is a risk somehow?

PS. First time posting here, but lurk a lot. Thank you for all the information here. Hopefully my blurb here is useful for your list.

Here is part 2 of the Alpine foray, along with some clarity on motivations as well as conclusions regarding comparisions to Antix.

It wasn’t just “on a whim”, but in the goal of removing telemetry as well as making my computing experience more effective. I’m with everyone here on the systemd (i.e. telemetry) issue. The Alpine excursion was to try and get the latest Python and Qutebrowser (hence QT6) running (not reasonable on any debian system right now). I have been trying using KB only interfaces (no mouse) and from a features perspective I can’t find a better browser. The rest of the software is no problem on Antix.

I should elaborate on how I got Herbstluftwm working. On a second look, not only is bash not installed (this is a packaging issue), but dzen2 is NOT in any Alpine repo. I was able to get dzen2 installed from a git package. This also required the typical toolsets which can be foun d on the Alpine wiki regarding “building packages”. I didn’t fully create package files, but just got enough installed to compile and do a make install.

The main comparisions of the current Alpine and Antix-23-runit:

Resource Usage: Alpine boots in ~200MB, while Antix is about the same. However, after a day or so of operation (qutebrowser, newsboat, mpv player on all day, editing in vim, and base HLWM with no picom or anything) I closed all the apps and got htop running. The Antix machine sits at about 950MB while the Alpine system went back down to almost what it booted to. I have never played with musl libs before but I have a suspicion that it played a part in Alpine performing better. Also, I suspect the memory management of Antix comes from Debby and Ian which would not use musl but also perhaps allow more ram sloshyness. Either way, on an 8MB machine I didn’t experience any issues except on the Antix machine when the runit system was doing something (I had typing lag and such during these moment).

Boot Time: Alpine boots slower, double the time. Here we are talking 16 seconds vs 10 seconds. I got it to boot faster on Alpine by going full on startx instead of using slim (which Antix has a far better version of).

Packaging: Antix (deb) is what it is and I’m assuming most know what apt is like. The APK program is quite easy to use but lacks many apt like features that are handy. If you know scripts, you can get what you need (such as list the packages that can be updated) for those features. The Alpine system have a couple of nice scripts called setup-xorg (for just base xorg sytems to run a WM like I3, dwm, etc. … this is the path that I took) and setup-desktop which install farm more extensive packages and gets you going with lightdm, a desktop, and all the services (including logind I presume). When I tried it, the setup-desktop script worked flawlessly (yeah, I installed a few times because I broke a few things before getting to this point) and I had XFCE running and just ran the pipewire-start script and sound was going. Both systems can get any desktop user up and running (out of the box with Antix, or just using the command script setup-deskop on a fresh install with a created user).

Installation Experience: I found Alpines install script flawless and quick. If the setup-install scrip provided by Alpine has any issue or you want anything off center then you’ll do something akin to the arch setup to get the system installed (or in parts of what Arch does, like formatting drives via command line and such). I don’t think I would have wanted to go through all that just to test a few things so I’m glad the Alpine install script worked. The Antix install has an issue on the 23 release where you have to connect to the internet and do an “apt update && apt dist-upgrade) or there can be a problem creating the boot setup (Artix guys in here may want to elaborate). That said, I think the Antix install issue this time is just a bump in the road as I noted a few of the MX guys had the issue on their beta install of MX-23. Regardless, both required the internet and worked just fine with a little attention.

My final thoughts are this. I am stoked about learning more about musl, it sure seems to run nicely. However, the logind issue persists and they seem to be late on their stated goal of porting thier init stuff to s6. I could imagine Alpine being a nice starting point (to fork?) as a base for what the guys at Antix are doing if the deb system keeps on the way it is. Two comparisions of late really spell it all out as to why Antix is on the strict list and Alpine isn’t.

The first was the Antix response to logind parts getting pushed into the system by Debby and Ian. It was handled very quickly by one of their devs within a day or so. I would have to wait a week or so when this would happen on Obarun (some package would get pushed to the arch repos with systemd req and it takes a bit for the devs to recompile and repackage). The second thing to note is the amount of eyes on many deb packages compared to Alpine. I found not one but TWO bugs in the install package for Herbstluftwm. It was a total cakewalk if you know what to do but note that Alpine comes with ASH not BASH so if you don’t get to see the errors one wouldn’t figure out that bash itself isn’t installed. The conclusion here is that there are probably many more packaging problems in the Alpine system.

Both situations show a huge plus for Antix over Alpine right now because the devs are watching and responding. I do have to say though that with some tweaking and attention like the Antix devs have shonw as of late, I dould diveroll most of my systems onto something similar to Alpine base, but with the developers of Antix at the helm. I have not the time or knowledge of how to maintain such a system, but predict it’s going to happen soon. Alpine is as close one can get to an easy install of a suckless system, but isn’t suckless in it’s core … rather seems to overlap with some of the suckless ideas due to a shared effect of minimalism.