#alpine linux

[q4os-tde-official]

can anybody who uses alpine explain why my colors are fucked?

[andmaybegayer]

Any recommendations/cautions about using Alpine Linux on the desktop? It's always intrigued me and you're the only person I've seen post about it

Alpine is pretty good for desktop, very stable, good security practice, professional development philosophy, broad package availability. You will run into some very obvious pitfalls, although they can mostly be obviated by using some modern applications.

The Alpine wiki is a little sparse and at times can be weirdly focussed, like spending a lot of the installation page talking about the very specific usecase of a diskless install. Nonetheless, it's quite good and should be your first port of call. A lot of the things I'm mentioning here are well covered in the article on Daily Driving for Desktop use. I'm basically just editorializing here.

The installation procedure is command-line only, but pretty straightforward, you run setup-alpine and follow the prompts, assuming you want a basic system. If you need special disk partitioning, you'll usually have to do it yourself. There's a whole whackload of helpers to get you set up, like setup-desktop which will help you install any of 'gnome', 'plasma', 'xfce', 'mate', 'sway', or 'lxqt'. Most of these are called by setup-alpine for you, but not the desktop one. You can call it at any time though.

Most obviously, musl libc, no glibc. Packaged software will work fine. There's a compatibility shim called gcompat that will usually work, but might fall apart on more complicated software expecting glibc, for example I've had no luck running glibc AppImages. For more complex software, Flatpaks are a good option, e.g. Steam runs great on Alpine as a Flatpak, I run the Homestuck Companion Flatpak. Your last ditch is containerization and chroots, which are fortunately really easy to handle, just install podman and Distrobox and you can run anything that won't run on Alpine inside a Fedora or Debian or Whatever container seamlessly with your desktop.

Less obviously: no systemd. Systemd underpins some really common features of modern Linux and not having it around means you have to use a few different tools that are anywhere from comparable to a little worse for some tasks. Packaged applications will work smoothly, just learn the OpenRC invocations, Alpine has a really great wiki. For writing your own services, it's a lot more limited than SystemD, you're not going to have full access to like, udev functionality, instead you get the good but kind of weird eudev system.

If you're mainly installing things from the repos you'll barely notice the difference, other than that every package is split up into three, <package>, <package>-docs, and <package>-dev. This is a container-y thing, to allow Alpine container images to install the smallest possible packageset. If you need man pages you'll have to install them specifically.

Alpine has a very solid main repo, and a community repo that's plenty good, and worth enabling on any desktop system. It'll generally be automatically enabled when you set up a desktop anyway, but just a notice if you're going manual. You can run Stable alpine, which updates every six months, or if you want you can run Edge, which is a rolling release of packages as they get added. Lots of very up-to-date software, and pretty stable as these go. You can go from Stable->Edge pretty easily, going back not so much.

There's also the Testing repo, only available on Edge, which I don't really recommend, especially since apkbuild files are so easy to run if you just need one thing that has most of its dependencies met.

Package management is with APK, which is fast and easy to work with. The wiki page will cover you.

Side note: if you want something more batteries-included, you could look at Postmarket, an Alpine derivative mainly focussed on running on smartphones but that is a pretty capable desktop OS, and which has a fairly friendly setup process. I run this on an ARM Chromebook and it's solid. Installation requires some reading between the lines because it's intended for the weird world of phones, so you'll probably want to follow the PMBootstrap route.

[uwubuntu-official]

You've heard of uwuntu, now get ready for...

Nyalpine Linux.

[flatpak-official]

some more of my sway setup with my custom colorscheme perona, feat. the obsidian gui that i barely use (nvim baby). spotify made me reset my password twice while i set up spotify_player for the suspicious activity of using the developer dashboard :)

sway, tmux + alacritty, yambar, bemenu, neovim; spotify-player, btop, fastfetch, obsidian, neovim; wallpaper is ship fanart

[nixcraft]

Ncurses is a library that lets programmers create TUIs on Linux and Unix-like systems. It’s popular for developing TUIs for text editors, terminal emulators, games, and CLI utilities. Here is how install Ncurses support in Alpine Linux to build apps

-> Alpine Linux fatal error: ncurses.h: No such file or directory fix

[iglunix-official]

I use Iglunix, btw, because it's not GNU/ or even GNU+ Linux. it's an independent, designed-to-be-portable userspace that's currently focusing on using the most widely used kernel in existence, Linux. It's goal is to work in harmony using all free software… specifically excluding software made by GNU. This is not to say GNU+ or /Linux is bad, by any means, but more to say that it's incorrect to for one to assume that if someone says that they use Linux, that they mean they use gnu+ or / or whatever Linux. (We’re down to just gmake for the main install!)

"I use Linux as my operating system," I state proudly to the unkempt, bearded man. He swivels around in his desk chair with a devilish gleam in his eyes, ready to mansplain with extreme precision. "Actually", he says with a grin, "Linux is just the kernel. You use GNU+Linux!' I don't miss a beat and reply with a smirk, "I use Alpine, a distro that doesn't include the GNU Coreutils, or any other GNU code. It's Linux, but it's not GNU+Linux." The smile quickly drops from the man's face. His body begins convulsing and he foams at the mouth and drops to the floor with a sickly thud. As he writhes around he screams "I-IT WAS COMPILED WITH GCC! THAT MEANS IT'S STILL GNU!" Coolly, I reply "If windows were compiled with GCC, would that make it GNU?" I interrupt his response with "-and work is being made on the kernel to make it more compiler-agnostic. Even if you were correct, you won't be for long." With a sickly wheeze, the last of the man's life is ejected from his body. He lies on the floor, cold and limp. I've womansplained him to death.

[pc-freedom]

Alpine Linux とは？軽量でセキュアなコンテナ向け Linux ディストリビューション

Alpine Linux の基本的な特徴 Alpine Linux は、セキュリティとパフォーマンスを重視した軽量なLinuxディストリビューションです。標準的な Linux ディストリビューションと比べて非常に小さなサイズでありながら、堅牢なセキュリティ機能を備えており、特にコンテナ環境での利用に最適化されています。Alpine Linux は、musl libc と BusyBox を使用し、効率的なパッケージ管理が可能です。 Continue reading Alpine Linux とは？軽量でセキュアなコンテナ向け Linux ディストリビューション

[zram-official]

finally have my personal git server up and running :3

[vegnuli]

Journal - Despejando mitos sobre la recuperación y el arranque rápido

#Journal no es necesario - Despejando #mitos sobre la #recuperación y el #arranque rápido en los sistemas de archivos #ext3 #ext4 #reiserfs #reiser4 #xfs para optimizar

Un sistema de archivos con journal realiza un seguimiento de los cambios aún no comprometidos con el sistema de archivos utilizando un registro circular. Se usa solo para recuperarse después de un desastre lo más rápido posible. No se trata de datos seguros o de copia de seguridad de datos de nuevo corrupción.. concepto erróneo común de los usuarios de Linux. Por lo tanto, cualquier…

[q4os-tde-official]

installing alpine linux on my Toshiba NB200, at the recommendation of @fishandchips321

gonna be documenting the experience because why not?

[andmaybegayer]

Moving from DigitalOcean to Hetzner for price and performance reasons. They don't provide default images for either of these so I'm Finagling it either way.

[nksistemas]

Alpine Linux 3.21 Llega con Linux Kernel 6.12 LTS y Soporte Inicial para LoongArch64

El equipo de Alpine Linux ha anunciado la disponibilidad de Alpine Linux 3.21, una actualización importante de esta distribución independiente, ligera y enfocada en la seguridad. Novedades de Alpine Linux 3.21 Esta nueva versión, lanzada más de seis meses después de Alpine Linux 3.20, está impulsada por el Linux Kernel 6.12 LTS, garantizando soporte extendido y mejoras de estabilidad. Entre las…

[nixcraft]

-> How to restart network service in Alpine Linux

[brandinotbroke]

Linux distros - what is the difference, which one should I choose?

Caution, VERY long post.

With more and more simmers looking into linux lately, I've been seeing the same questions over and over again: Which distro should I choose? Is distro xyz newbie-friendly? Does this program work on that distro?

So I thought I'd explain the concept of "distros" and clear some of that up.

What are the key differences between distros?

Linux distros are NOT different operating systems (they're all still linux!) and the differences between them aren't actually as big as you think.

Update philosophy: Some distros, like Ubuntu, (supposedly) focus more on stability than being up-to-date. These distros will release one big update once every year or every other year and they are thoroughly tested. However, because the updates are so huge, they inevitably tend to break stuff anyway. On the other end of the spectrum are so-called "rolling release" distros like Arch. They don't do big annual updates, but instead release smaller updates very frequently. They are what's called "bleeding edge" - if there is something new out there, they will be the first ones to get it. This can of course impact stability, but on the other hand, stuff gets improved and fixed very fast. Third, there are also "middle of the road" distros like Fedora, which kind of do... both. Fedora gets big version updates like Ubuntu, but they happen more frequently and are comparably smaller, thus being both stable and reasonably up-to-date.

Package manager: Different distros come with different package managers (APT on ubuntu, DNF on Fedora, etc.). Package managers keep track of all the installed programs on your PC and allow you to update/install/remove programs. You'll often work with the package manager in the terminal: For example, if you want to install lutris on Fedora, you'd type in "sudo dnf install lutris" ("sudo" stands for "super user do", it's the equivalent of administrator rights on Windows). Different package managers come with different pros and cons.

Core utilities and programs: 99% of distros use the same stuff in the background (you don’t even directly interact with it, e.g. background process managing). The 1% that do NOT use the same stuff are obscure distros like VoidLinux, Artix, Alpine, Gentoo, Devuan. If you are not a Linux expert, AVOID THOSE AT ALL COST.

Installation process: Some distros are easier to install than others. Arch is infamous for being a bit difficult to install, but at the same time, its documentation is unparalleled. If you have patience and good reading comprehension, installing arch would literally teach you all you ever need to know about Linux. If you want to go an easier and safer route for now, anything with an installer like Mint or Fedora would suit you better.

Community: Pick a distro with an active community and lots of good documentation! You’ll need help. If you are looking at derivatives (e.g. ZorinOS, which is based on Ubuntu which is based on Debian), ask yourself: Does this derivative give you enough benefits to potentially give up community support of the larger distro it is based on? Usually, the answer is no.

Okay, but what EDITION of this distro should I choose?

"Editions" or “spins” usually refer to variations of the same distro with different desktop environments. The three most common ones you should know are GNOME, KDE Plasma and Cinnamon.

GNOME's UI is more similar to MacOS,  but not exactly the same.

KDE Plasma looks and feels a lot like Windows' UI, but with more customization options.

Cinnamon is also pretty windows-y, but more restricted in terms of customization and generally deemed to be "stuck in 2010". 

Mint vs. Pop!_OS vs. Fedora

Currently, the most popular distros within the Sims community seem to be Mint and Fedora (and Pop!_OS to some extent). They are praised for being "beginner friendly". So what's the difference between them?

Both Mint and Pop!_OS are based on Ubuntu, whereas Fedora is a "standalone" upstream distro, meaning it is not based on another distro.

Personally, I recommend Fedora over Mint and Pop!_OS for several reasons. To name only a few:

I mentioned above that Ubuntu's update philosophy tends to break things once a big update rolls around every two years. Since both Mint and Pop!_OS are based on Ubuntu, they are also affected by this.

Ubuntu, Mint and Pop!_OS like to modify their stuff regularly for theming/branding purposes, but this ALSO tends to break things. It is apparently so bad that there is an initiative to stop this.

Pop!_OS uses the GNOME desktop environment, which I would not recommend if you are switching from Windows. Mint offers Cinnamon, which is visually and technically outdated (they use the x11 windowing system standard from 1984), but still beloved by a lot of people. Fedora offers the more modern KDE Plasma.

Personal observation: Most simmers I've encountered who had severe issues with setting up Linux went with an Ubuntu-based distro. There's just something about it that's fucked up, man.

And this doesn't even get into the whole Snaps vs. Flatpak controvery, but I will skip this for brevity.

Does SimPE (or any other program) work on this distro?

If it works on Fedora, then it works on Mint/Ubuntu/Arch/etc., and vice versa. This is all just a question of having the necessary dependencies installed and installing the program itself properly. Some distros may have certain prerequisites pre-installed, while others don't, but you can always just install those yourself. Like I said, different distros are NOT different operating systems. It's all still Linux and you can ultimately customize it however you want.

In short: Yeah, all Sims 2-related programs work. Yes, ReShade too. It ultimately doesn't really matter what distro you use as long as it is not part of the obscure 1% I mentioned above.

A little piece of advice

Whatever distro you end up choosing: get used to googling stuff and practice reading comprehension! There are numerous forums, discord servers and subreddits where you can ask people for help. Generally speaking, the linux community is very open to helping newbies. HOWEVER, they are not as tolerant to nagging and laziness as the Sims community tends to be. Show initiative, use google search & common sense, try things out before screaming for help and be detailed and respectful when explaining your problems. They appreciate that. Also, use the arch wiki even if you do not use Arch Linux – most of it is applicable to other distros as well.