First FreeDesktop and now Alpine damm
Dang, oof
It’s not too bad tho, we’ve already replaced this with Github actions: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/356023
yet another reason to back flatpaks and distro-agnostic software packaging. We cant afford to use dozens of build systems to maintain dozens of functionally-identical application repositories
This is such a superficial take.
Flatpaks have their use-case. Alpine has its use-case as a small footprint distro, focused on security. Using flatpaks would nuke that ethos.
Furthermore, they need those servers to build their core and base system packages. There is no distro out there that uses flatpaks or appimages for their CORE.
Any distro needs to build their toolchain, libs and core. Flatpaks are irrelevant to this discussion.
At the risk of repteating myself, flatpaks are irrelevant to Alpine because its a small footprint distro, used alot in container base images, containers use their own packaging!
Furthermore, flatpaks are literal bloat, compared to alpines’ apk packages which focus on security and minimalism.
Edit: Flatpak literally uses alpine to build its packages. No alpine, no flatpaks. Period
Flatpaks have their use. This is not that. Check your ignorance.
I know there’s limitations to flatpak and other agnostic app bundling systems but there’s simply far too many resources invested into repacking the same applications across each distro. These costs wouldnt be so bad if more resources were pooled behind a single repository and build system.
As for using flatpaks at the core of a distro, we know from snaps that it is possible to distribute core OS components/updates via a containerised package format. As far as I know there is no fundamental design flaw that makes flatpak incapable of doing so, rather than the fact it lacks the will of distro maintainers to develop the features in flatpak necessary to support it.
That being said, it’s far from my point. Even if Alpine, Fedora, Ubuntu, SUSE etc. all used their native package formats for core OS features and utilities, they could all stand to save a LOT in the costs of maintaining superfluous (and often buggy and outdated) software by deferring to flatpak where possible.
There needs to be a final push to flatpak adoption the same way we hovered between wayland and xorg for years until we decided that Wayland was most beneficial to the future of Linux. Of course, this meant addressing the flaws of the project, and fixing a LOT of broken functionality, but we’re not closer than ever to dropping xorg.
Pretty sure flatpak uses alpine as a bootstrap… Flatpak, after all, brings along an entire distro to run an app.
I’m a fan of flatpaks, so this isn’t to negate your argument. Just pointing out that Flathub is also using Equinix.
Interlude: Equinix Metal née Packet has been sponsoring our heavy-lifting servers doing actual building for the past 5 years. Unfortunately, they are shutting down, meaning we need to move out by the end of April 2025.
I don’t think it’s a solution for this, it would just mean maintaining many distro-agnostic repos. Forks and alternatives always thrive in the FOSS world.
Let the community package it to deb,rpm etc while the devs focus on flatpak/appimage
How are they so small and underfunded? My hobby home servers and internet connection satisfy their simple requirements
800TB of bandwidth per month?
That averages out to around 300 megabytes per second. No way anyone has that at home comercially.
One of the best comercial fiber connections i ever saw will provide 50 megabytes per second upload, best effort that is.
No way in hell you can satisfy that bandwidth requirement at home. Lets not mention that they need 3 nodes with such bw.
50MB/s is like 0.4Gbit/s. Idk where you are, but in Switzerland you can get a symmetric 10Gbit/s fiber link for like 40 bucks a month as a residential customer. Considering 100Gbit/s and even 400Gbit/s links are already widely deployed in datacenter environments, 300MB/s (or 2.4Gbit/s) could easily be handled even by a single machine (especially since the workload basically consists of serving static files).
So I have to move to Swiss then, got it.
That, and safe streets, kind people, clean air, clean water, gorgeous mountains, war safety, high PPP, I could go on…
Yeah, I know, I am in the process of leaving where I am now (eu citizen) and its between uk, germany and the netherlands. The reason I didnt look seriously at swiss, is because of all the stories I heard about people never integrating, despite efforts.
I’m looking for my forever place, that means balls deep in every aspect.
I can recommend Germany and Netherlands!
I live in NL myself, even though we have complaints (high taxes, delayed trains) I don’t think they’re nearly as serious as I hear from other countries (like US trans people getting declined public services, people living in fear of being deported or killed)
Although we don’t really have affordable housing, I would say that’s a fairly big issue.
The PPP in Germany tends to be a bit better (slightly lower wages, but even lower grocery prices and rent prices), and overall it seems people follow rules and order a good deal better.
Overall, both are good countries to live in IMO. I can’t speak for the UK, though.
Why did you have to say you want to be balls deep in the UK, Netherlands or Germany though…?
Probably not one person, but that could be distributed.
Like folding at home :D
Yeah, thats almost 150% more than my (theoretical) bandwidth at home (Gbps but I live alone & just don’t want to pay much), and that is just assuming constant workload (peaks must be massive).
This is indeed considerate, yet hopefully solvable. It certainly is from the link perspective.
On my current internet plan I can move about 130TB/month and that’s sufficent for me, but I could upgrade plan to satisfy the requirement
Your home server might have the required bandwidth but not requisite the infra to support server load (hundreds of parallel connections/downloads).
Bandwidth is only one aspect of the problem.
Ten gig fibre for internal networking, enterprise SFP+ network hardware, big meaty 72 TB FreeBSD ZFS file server with plenty of cache, backup power supply and UPS
The tech they require really isn’t expensive anymore
That’s ~2.4Gbit/s. There are multiple residential ISPs in my area offering 10Gbit/s up for around $40/month, so even if we assume the bandwidth is significantly oversubscribed a single cheap residential internet plan should be able to handle that bandwidth no problem (let alone a for a datacenter setup which probably has 100Gbit/s links or faster)
If you do 800TB in a month on any residential service you’re getting fair use policy’ed before the first day is over, sadly.
if you have 10gbit internet you could do 4x that
I will just say:
WHAT THE FUCK are we doing? Alpine has been used in Docker, and Docker is now run everywhere.
WHY are these necessary tools underfunded? They barely even need anything. Why do companies not support them?
Can we start giving at least 0.000001% of net profit to the basic tools used? Can we globally force companies to give the smallest pittance to the open-source projects they make trillions off of?
Alpine has been used in Docker, and Docker is now run everywhere
This is exactly what came to my mind while reading through the article.
Torrent?
That solves the media distribution related storage issue, but not the CI/CD pipeline infra issue.
We underfund our heroes, don’t we?
(Also that monitors model name in the thumbnail “UHD 4K 2K” :D
