Yes, I know so much of Alpine’s lightweightness comes from not using glibc.
But still, the other options I see are far from being slimmed down. Debian, Ubuntu server, CentOS… They all could use some cuts.
What’s the most slimmed down non-desktop distro that still has a glibc base? I honestly don’t care if it has its own package manager (build tool handles this for me). Just wanna use it in containers for running server apps.
Why don’t you want Musl?
I’m running this on a low resource arm64 device. I have had trouble cross compiling to arm64 musl (availability of pre compiled binaries is low).
It also caused me a bunch of random small issues. For example nodejs doesn’t officially support musl binaries. Bunch of random small things, like sdkman not working on musl.
Yes, weird corner cases in musl cause a lot of things to misbehave when run on musl. For example, DNS upgrade to TCP, which is required for certain queries and covered by one of the DNS RFCs, wasn’t implemented in musl for the longest time, although I think it finally got implemented recently. However, there are other cases like this fwiu.
Installing Python packages with pip is a hit-and-miss too