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Alpine Linux vs Ubuntu: What are the differences?
What is Alpine Linux? Security-oriented, lightweight Linux distribution based on musl libc and busybox. Alpine Linux is a security-oriented, lightweight Linux distribution based on musl libc and busybox.
What is Ubuntu? The leading OS for PC, tablet, phone and cloud. Ubuntu is an ancient African word meaning ‘humanity to others’. It also means ‘I am what I am because of who we all are’. The Ubuntu operating system brings the spirit of Ubuntu to the world of computers.
Alpine Linux and Ubuntu belong to "Operating Systems" category of the tech stack.
Asana, CircleCI, and DuckDuckGo are some of the popular companies that use Ubuntu, whereas Alpine Linux is used by CircleCI, Decision6, and Redsift. Ubuntu has a broader approval, being mentioned in 1845 company stacks & 1709 developers stacks; compared to Alpine Linux, which is listed in 39 company stacks and 16 developer stacks.
Ubuntu is much more faster over Windows and helps to get software and other utilities easier and within a short span of time compared to Windows.
Ubuntu helps to get robustness and resiliency over Windows. Ubuntu runs faster than Windows on every computer that I have ever tested. LibreOffice (Ubuntu's default office suite) runs much faster than Microsoft Office on every computer that I have ever tested.
Global familiarity, free, widely used, and as a debian distro feels more comfortable when rapidly switching between local macOS and remote command lines.
CentOS does boast quite a few security/stability improvements, however as a RHEL-based distro, differs quite significantly in the command line and suffers from slightly less frequent package updates. (Could be a good or bad thing depending on your use-case and if it is public facing)
At the moment of the decision, my desktop was the primary place I did work. Due to this, I can't have it blow up on me while I work. While Arch is interesting and powerful, Ubuntu offers (at least for me) a lot more stability and lets me focus on other things than maintaining my own OS installation.
Pros of Alpine Linux
- Secure9
- Good in containers9
- Fast7
Pros of Ubuntu
- Free to use228
- Easy setup for testing discord bot96
- Gateway Linux Distro57
- Simple interface53
- Don't need driver installation in most cases7
- Many active communities5
- Open Source4
- Easy to custom3
- Many flavors/distros based on ubuntu1
- Great OotB Linux Shell Experience1
- Software Availability1
- Lightweight container base OS1
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Cons of Alpine Linux
- Cannot install metasploit2
Cons of Ubuntu
- Demanding system requirements4
- Adds overhead and unnecessary complexity over Debian3
- Systemd1
- Snapd installed by default1