1. We're diskless
2. We take a LEAF out of the history book
3. We climb the Alpine mountain
4. Pick a very small editor
5. And we don our hoodies

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0:00 Cold Open
1:30 No Disks for You!
10:35 1997, LRP
11:43 2000, No More Money
13:09 2001, LRP Struggles
13:59 2003, LRP Put to Rest + LEAF and GNAP
14:58 2004, GNAP v0.5
15:04 2005, A Linux Powered Integrated Network Engine
16:18 2006, Alpine 1.4 | 2007, Alpine 1.5 and 1.6
16:37 2008, Alpine 2.0 Added Busybox
16:54 2009, Alpine 1.8 and 1.9
17:13 2010, Alpine 1.10 and 2.0
18:05 2011, Alpine 2.2 and 2.3
18:28 2012, Alpine 2.4 and 2.5
18:51 2013, Alpine and the Container Renaissance
20:11 2014, Alpine 3.0 and musl libc
20:43 2015, Alpine 3.2, 3.3 and Some Restructuring
21:19 2016, Alpine 3.4, 3.5 and OpenSSL
21:55 2017, Alpine 3.6, 3.7 and PostmarketOS
22:39 2018, Alpine 3.8 and Raspberry Pi 3 Support
23:01 2019, Alpine 3.9, 3.10 and 3.11
24:08 2020, Alpine 3.12 and the Last LEAF
24:28 2021, Alpine 3.13, 3.14 and 3.15
25:10 2022, Alpine 3.16 and the End of the History
26:45 What is Alpine, Really?
41:34 Our Thoughts on Alpine
1:04:07 Next Time! More Text Ed and a New Distro
1:13:58 Stinger

Banter

Disks! They're dead, Jim.

• Dan's 3TB Seagate - not noted for reliability but was reliable.
• Leo's 240GB Adata SU630

Announcements

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Alpine Linux the History

• Back in 1997, Dave Cineage created the Linux Router Project, or LRP.
• The Linux Embedded Appliance Framework, or LEAF project was started
• Oxygen
• EigerStein
• The Linux Router Project was done
• The LEAF project was still there
• August of 2005, Natanael Copa, while working for a non-profit company on VPNs and firewalls, announced a new distribution on the linux.leaf.devel mailing list.
• Alpine originally stood for A Linux Powered Integrated Network Engine.
• The earlier versions are a little cloudy, but we see Alpine 1.4 being developed in 2006, 1.5 in 2007, Alpine 1.6 released on April 30th of 2007 and the switch to development of 1.7 in the days after.
• Alpine 2.0, the then development branch, first commit "added busybox"
• Alpine 1.9 - OpenRC shipped and able to install on hard disks.
• A new website is launched
• Alpine Linux 2.0 is released
• The team announced the Alpine Linux Forum.
• Alpine 3.0 is released, and uClibc is dropped in favor of musl libc.
• Alpine 3.2 is released and included the MATE desktop.
• Alpine 3.3 is released with big renames of the editions that already existed.
• Alpine 3.4 is released with support for running within VM's, better DNS support and running on the Linux Kernel's Long Term Support release 4.4.
• Alpine 3.5 is released and this marks the first version to drop OpenSSL for LibreSSL.
• Alpine 3.6 is released with support for 64-bit PowerPC and IBM z Systems.
• Alpine 3.7 is released and now supports EFI and GRUB.
• Alpine 3.8 is released a bit behind schedule and marks the only release of the year.
• Alpine 3.9 is released improved GRUB support, initial support for the newish ARMv7 and the switch back to OpenSSL.
• Alpine 3.10 is released with lightdm for login and display management, which shows a renewed interest in running Alpine on the desktop.
• Alpine 3.11 is released with Raspberry Pi 4 support, initial Gnome and KDE Plasma support and the addition of Vulkan, DXVK and the Rust programming language.
• Alpine 3.12 is released with support for the D programming language.
• Alpine and others just do it better, so LEAF sees its last stable release at 7.0.1
• Alpine 3.13 is released and comes with official cloud images for services like AWS, cloud-init and better wifi support on the software side.
• Alpine 3.14 is released with fail2ban taking a back seat to sshguard because it... failed... to ban... and ClamAV is now community supported.
• Alpine 3.15 is released with kernel module compression using gzip, Gnome 41 and Plasma 5.23 land, and disk encryption is now supported right in the installer.
• Alpine 3.16 is released as the last release of this history with better NVMe support, adding SSH keys at boot, a new admin user creation process and a new setup-desktop script for desktop environment installation.

More Announcements

• Want to have a topic covered or have some feedback? - send us an email, contact@linuxuserspace.show

Alpine Linux Links

• Alpine Linux Web Page
• Alpine Wiki
• Alpine user handbook
• Alpine Linux on Twitter
• Alpine Downloads
• Alpine Linux Wikipedia page

Housekeeping

Catch these and other great topics as they unfold on our Subreddit or our News channel on Discord.

• Linux User Space subreddit
• Linux User Space Discord Server
• Linux User Space Telegram
• Linux User Space Matrix
• Linux User Space Twitch
• Linux User Space Mastodon
• Linux User Space Twitter

Next Time

We will discuss GNU Nano and the history. We also hope to have a couple of topics and some feedback.

Come back in two weeks for more Linux User Space

Stay tuned and interact with us on Twitter, Mastodon, Telegram, Matrix, Discord whatever. Give us your suggestions on our subreddit r/LinuxUserSpace Join the conversation. Talk to us, and give us more ideas. All the links in the show notes and on linuxuserspace.show.

We would like to acknowledge our top patrons. Thank you for your support!

Producer

• Bruno
• John
• Dave

Co-Producer

• Johnny
• Sravan
• Tim

Contributor

• Advait
• CubicleNate
• Eduardo S.
• Jill and Steve
• LiNuXsys666
• Nicholas
• Paul
• sleepyeyesvince

Support Linux User Space

1. We try to contain ourselves.
2. Clearly, all the history you need
3. Our clear hindsight
4. We plan to install the most popular distro of all time

0:00 Cold Open
1:19 VM's, Containers and Bundles, oh my!
16:09 The Origin Story
18:21 The History: 2015
20:00 2016
22:08 2017
22:59 2018
24:09 2019
25:34 2020
27:05 2021
27:41 2022
29:00 Thoughts on Clear Linux
1:09:26 Next Time: Emacs, Topics (and Alpine)
1:15:45 Stinger

Support us on Patreon!

Banter

• What's a container?
• What's a virtual machine?
• What's a Clear Container?
• What are Bundles?

Announcements

• Give us a sub on YouTube
• You can watch us live on Twitch the day after an episode drops.

Clear Linux the History

• 2015 - February 6th Clear Linux was officially released. The only reference we found
• 2015 - February 9 - The first downloadable images, marked 300, 310, 320, 330 and 340, show up at clearlinux.org .
• Arjan van de Ven penned an article
• 2016 - April 22 - Announcement that the Container-only OS will now start shipping a desktop for developers.
• In parallel, Robert Nesius announces
• Enter, Flatpak.
• The auto-updater is here
• XFCE, while still available, is no longer the default desktop. It's Gnome 3.24.
• The first Issue in Github about ffmpeg not being included shows up.
• "How to Clear"
• Wireguard is added
• Snap was and will remain unavailable and unsupported.
• A new installer beta is floating around
• The public forum is live!
• Cups enabled by default.
• version 2.0 of the new installer is released with a full graphical interface!
• An appeal to Linux developers.
• Offline installations are now available
• exFAT is available
• The distro will focus less on Desktop
• Clear Linux pulls out a win over EndeavourOS on the Ryzen 9 5900x.
• Ubuntu 21.04 enjoys plenty of kernel performance improvements, but Clear wins in all but a handful of benchmarks.
• Against Windows 11, Windows 10, Ubuntu 21.10, 21.04, and Arch Linux, Clear Linux wins in 68 out of 102 benchmarks. Windows 11 won 1.
• The first third-party swupd repo (that we could find)!
• Clear switches from the -O2 compiler flag for the kernel to -O3 for more SPEED

More Announcements

• Want to have a topic covered or have some feedback? - send us an email, contact@linuxuserspace.show

Clear Linux Links

• Clear Linux Home Page
• Clear Linux Forum
• Clear Linux on GitHub
• Clear is part of 01.org, Intel's open source technology
• How To Clear
• Documentation
• System Requirements
• OS Introduction
• Architecture Overview
• How Clear mounts stuff

Housekeeping

Catch these and other great topics as they unfold on our Subreddit or our News channel on Discord.

• Linux User Space subreddit
• Linux User Space Discord Server
• Linux User Space Telegram
• Linux User Space Matrix
• Linux User Space Twitch
• Linux User Space Mastodon
• Linux User Space Twitter

Next Time

We will discuss GNU Emacs and the history. We also hope to have a couple of topics and some feedback.

Come back in two weeks for more Linux User Space

Stay tuned and interact with us on Twitter, Mastodon, Telegram, Matrix, Discord whatever. Give us your suggestions on our subreddit r/LinuxUserSpace Join the conversation. Talk to us, and give us more ideas. All the links in the show notes and on linuxuserspace.show.

We would like to acknowledge our top patrons. Thank you for your support!

Producer

• Bruno
• John

Co-Producer

• Johnny
• Sravan
• Tim

Contributor

• Advait
• CubicleNate
• Eduardo S.
• Jill and Steve
• LiNuXsys666
• Nicholas
• Paul
• sleepyeyesvince

Support Linux User Space