Alpine linux hardened openbox and xfce4 tested

Apline linux is all about small and KISS, simple and small.  Unbelievably small for its functionality.  Its ease of installing and running is like no other we have ever tried.  It is aimed for people needing to build secure servers in virtual machines, clouds, etc. but it can serve as a desktop installation as well.  OpenRC is there to start everything you need up and supervise services.  Musl is a library replacing the huge usual glibc, and this alone is responsible for the small size and quickness.

The image selection for installing or using live is a little confusing.  It is confusing as there is standard. extended, vanilla, virtual, xen, and mini-root filesystem.  I used extended and that was a little more than 342MB, the rest are about 100MB or less.  By current trends that is confusingly small.

Artix now has a new primary repository – thanks to @Nadir

UPDATE April 18th 2018

Thanks everyone for their help. A primary mirror has been setup by @Nadir and the secondary ones should resume sync’ing soon. Matej has contacted the administrator of an academic network, who’s agreed to setup a mirror too. This went better (and sooner) than expected. Well done!

April 16th 2018:  Artix needs our help and we endorse every single positive attribute to the great work that they have contributed to the Open/Free world.  This is a serious call for help, especially if you are either rich or working within a large computing organization, such as a major university you can help.  Their single master repository server that their 4 mirrors depended on is gone.  Here is their own announcement:

Meet Debian, a fork of Devuan

It may sound funny, but you could have Devuan with systemD but you can’t have Debian without systemD.  Those who “say” you can they need to specify a procedure for the variety of debian editions so we all can attempt it.  Think about it, the team that produced devuan 1.0 stable were mostly debian developers (some of the best) who disagreed with the move after Debian 7 and took years of hard work to produce devuan.  I am here to testify that Devuan runs just as reliably as any debian.  You can pick and choose packages from any Debian based distros if it is not enough (just keep a cautious eye so systemD does not crawl in there), and within a couple of clicks you can install and run systemD if you so desire.  You are FREE to do so.  It is easier than installing paint.net.