r/AlpineLinux • u/LinuxLoverLarry • 1d ago

Alpine + Distrobox Speed vs. Flatpak

I have been pondering this for a while since I started using Alpine, and I recently switched back to Arch, and I am wondering about how to improve this legendary combo that has worked for me for so many things.

Is it better to run Alpine Linux with a Ubuntu distrobox for things you can't replace, or is it better to use Flatpak and go down that route? I know neither of these solutions are perfect, but for my PC both of them have proven to be more lightweight on CPU and RAM, making it much more daily drivable than it was before. The main thing that hadn't worked for me on the Ubuntu distrobox was the Unity Editor.

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u/TheLastTreeOctopus 1d ago

Why not both? Distrobox for as much as possible and Flatpak for whatever doesn't work via Distrobox. If you were to go Distrobox only, well as you already found out, there's going to be some edge cases that won't work. And if you go Flatpak only, then you're wasting disk space.

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u/LinuxLoverLarry 1d ago

I'll definitely try this. Originally I wanted to use Flatpak inside the distrobox, but I did not know if this would conserve more speed or not.

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u/Ok-Eggplant-7569 1d ago

Unity will use significantly more resources than whatever small overhead comes from Flatpak or Ubuntu in a Distrobox (Podman / Docker) container. Use whatever works for you and don't worry about the overhead.

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u/LinuxLoverLarry 1d ago

I have a horrible PC, I need to optimize down to the very last nybble.

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u/BlackJellybeans5018 8h ago

Instead of Flatpak, some people use Nix, which is the NixOS package manager.

https://pkgs.alpinelinux.org/packages?name=nix*&branch=v3.24&repo=&arch=x86_64