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Comment by Shared404 | Hacker News Reader

The way I see it, people should

A) Use the simplest possible solution, from a technical perspective. Right now for me, that's Pop!_OS, but I fully intend to move to BSD/Void/Alpine on my next machine.

B) Use what works with the right amount of effort. For many people, this is Linux/Windows/Mac, why not a different BSD as well?

Also, how is Linux any more mainstream then BSD? cough Darwin cough

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Ok maybe I am narrow-minded but Alpine has so many hidden gotchas such as not using muslc instead of glibc. This specifically causes most stuff not to compile from source properly. Depending on how you use your daily machine you might end up redoing everything inside Alpine and would be better served with something like Fedora or Debian.

My next machine is going to mostly be

A) Programming my own stuff, in which case I see that as a benefit, because it forces me to write portable code.

B) Managing servers, in which case it won't matter.

I do have some experience with it on a side laptop, and I quite enjoyed it.

That being said, the warning you brought up could certainly screw up many workflows, so thank you for the heads up.

Specifically where I run into it a lot is installing python modules that expect glibc to build something from source. The workaround is to either install the python module from the alpine package manager (apk) or to add in glibc to alpine.

90% of what programming I do is in C/Rust/sh, so I shouldn't run into that. Thanks for the heads up though, I'll keep it in mind when I do use python, which makes up a good chunk of that last 10%.

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