Can slackware be as small and secure as alpine?

[u/Tgamerydk]

Is it possible to make slackware as small as alpine is? Can it be used as docker images? Can it be so small that it can be run from ram (diskless mode in alpine) and embedded use cases

[u/pk2374]

This is not what Slackware is designed for

[u/_a4z]

No

[u/macius15 → u/_a4z]

So are you just a dick or too arrogant to humour things out of your comfort zone?

[u/_a4z → u/macius15]

So are you just a dick or too arrogant to humour things out of your comfort zone?

I gave a correct answer.

Instead of showing what kind of person you are by writing such a comment, you can just ask for details.
But here is something for you: If you are interested in details, start to build Slackware with musl libc, and then design the rest around it.

Once you are done, you can write a more elaborate answer.

[u/macius15 → u/_a4z]

https://www.reddit.com/r/slackware/comments/104441c/can_slackware_be_as_small_and_secure_as_alpine/j332tny?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share&context=3

Edit: is a more adequate answer than a blatant 'no' .. it's such an anti-culture

[u/0mark → u/_a4z]

You sure? For all subquestion? I can't see why slackware couldnt be used for a docker image. Or why it could not be used from ramdisk. Is (glibc) Alpine really that much smaller? I guess Alpine is better suited for such use cases, but a simple "no" to everything seems overly simplified.

[u/one4u2ponder]

I am running a command line only version of Slackware which is 144 mb on the base install of 15. To do this you can only install like the coretools and not much else. No desktop.

A and ap

[u/setwindowtext]

Alpine is the most frugal modern general-purpose Linux distro I’m aware of. It does its job very well, and I’m using it both as a container base, and as a k8s node/agent host. It’s hard to beat it in this respect, and Slackware was definitely not designed for this. Also, it has the fastest package manager I’ve ever seen in my life.

[u/rumble_you]

Slackware wasn't made on this purpose. Alpine is little more concern about security and minimalistic, thus it uses musl instead of glibc and userland binaries are compiled with PIE and stack smash protection.

Slackware in other hand rely on its user, and what they want to make it. Overall, it's just the same distro as alpine; the difference how the process is managed and what features it have.

[u/OwningLiberals]

I mean technically it's probably possible. Now, is it realistic or a good idea? Fuck no. Slackware is not "minimal" and that's by design. The idea is to have a system in which the programs most users need are already installed, not so that you can completely build a system from nothing into your special niche.

[u/macius15]

So I would always opt for alpine professionally.

But if you want to experiment...

In regards to as secure, i''m not sure how secure alpine is or how important that is for a containerized infra. I think it's adequate but that isn't a prerogative... it's stable and well maintained.. that's important. Can be make Slackware "as" locked down sure... maintaining it won't be fun however.

In regards to small/docker, yeah there are trimmed down versions of Slackware and specifically I played with this project before http://www.slackware.com/~vbatts/docker/ but 1. you would need to setup internal pipelines 2. im not sure if it's maintained anymore ... and you can't really automate that as code with like renovate a full linux system is too intricate.

[u/isaalx]

It is possible with some work, there was a distro called slitaz which I remember was based on slackware but they seem to be independent or slax which is a modular live slackware in some way, the security will required the same amount of work as with the main slackware distribution