Alpine Linux Compared to Other Distributions

Key features of Alpine Linux

Alpine Linux is a very popular Linux distribution. There is a multitude of reasons for choosing Alpine Linux:

• Size: Alpine Linux Docker images are very small. The base image is under 6 MB in size compared to a Fedora base image, which weighs in at 159 MB, or the slim image of Debian, which is 84 MB. Small images don’t take up as much storage space and don’t take much time to download.
• Speed: apk, Alpine’s package manager, is high speed. While apt may take minutes to install and set up a package, apk usually finishes operations within a few seconds on fast connections.
• Simplicity: Alpine Linux generally tries to be as simple as possible. This makes it easier to understand the individual parts of Alpine.
• Security: Alpine Linux is a security-oriented distribution. It uses hardening flagsSpecial compilation flags that make common exploits like buffer overflows harder to exploit. when compiling its packages and has a protocol for tracking security issues in packages. Alpine’s simplicity also helps here: simpler implementations tend to be easier to code and usually contain fewer (security) bugs.

Alpine Linux also has some unique features:

• Run from RAM: Due to its small size, Alpine Linux can be loaded into RAM upon booting. Using the Alpine Local Backup tool (called lbu), changes made to the files in RAM can be synched back to the disk. This can be useful for embedded devices, where constantly writing state changes to the disk would be very slow. Instead, changes are only written to disk on shutdown.
• The Alpine Configuration Framework (ACF) is a component of Alpine that allows for the graphical configuration of an Alpine Linux install. Users of ACF may configure parts of Alpine like OpenVPN, DNS, the Firewall, and so on.