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What's the deal with Alpine not using GNU? Is it a technical or ideological thing? Or is it another "because we can" type distro?
All the core tools are actually a single executable with many symlinks to it, which makes the distro very compact. This makes it very nice as a base for Docker images.
It's because we can to an extreme. Extremely lightweight distro. Very nice in containers and vms. One of the most loved ones out there.
Yar
I don't know if people use it on desktop but with its minimal size it's convenient as hell for docker images that don't need a lot of dependencies installed
I used it on a laptop for a while. Pretty impressive just how lightweight it is, but a bit of a grind to initially get everything working as expected. Overall, I'm a big fan.
I know it's very efficient and small (I believe it needs less than 80mib of ram with nothing else running) and that they leave out some of the basic commands like man to save space. Maybe they wrote more minimal versions of some coreutils?
RAM usage depends on what you run inside the container not on the image size. If the container runs a single small program it will use a small amount of RAM regardless of the image it's based on.
I specified that it would be running nothing (other than the init system which is the tty). Thereby the amount of ram required should not vary by much.