Yes, I know so much of Alpine’s lightweightness comes from not using glibc.

But still, the other options I see are far from being slimmed down. Debian, Ubuntu server, CentOS… They all could use some cuts.

What’s the most slimmed down non-desktop distro that still has a glibc base? I honestly don’t care if it has its own package manager (build tool handles this for me). Just wanna use it in containers for running server apps.

  • kinttach@lemm.eeEnglish
    51·
    1 year ago

    What runtime do you need? If it’s Node.js, the “slim” Docker images are lightweight and based on Debian. (for example node:lts-slim)

    • ck_
      4·
      1 year ago

      250mb is a curios interpretation of “lightweight”

      • kinttach@lemm.eeEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        Standard node images are around 1 GB. node:lts-alpine is about 176 MB. So it’s fairly close to alpine in this case.

        • ck_
          1·
          1 year ago

          Sure, but it you consider that 166MB of that is for the node part alone, the “slim” image ships 80MB of stuff to basically do nothing

          • kinttach@lemm.eeEnglish
            3·
            1 year ago

            It would be interesting to see what the difference is. The slim image doesn’t even have vi installed, although it does have bash. And of course, git, etc. are not present. Much of the difference could be the size difference between musl and libc, and the size difference between apk and apt metadata.

            I don’t think OP is going to find a non-musl distro as small as Alpine. These stripped-down Debians are a lot bigger, but among the smallest non-Alpine that you’ll find.

            • ck_
              1·
              1 year ago

              The Wolfi based chainguard images for node are glibc based and come in at 111mb, so its definitely possible.