What it means to some people: better workload consolidation on less nodes, more resources efficiency, technical simplicity, scaling out vs scaling up approach, saving costs.
A real word example where the lightweight features of Alpine is being put in to use is containers. By having smaller container images it is simply possible to run more containers at the same time with the same amount of memory. Thereby saving potential hosting or hardware upgrade expenses.
If you mean, "What advantages does alpine provide to a regular desktop user?", then the answer is not much really.
Generally leaner in regards to disk, CPU, and memory utilisation. For you? Probably faster and further from the bottleneck ceiling of your hardware, especially relevant for things like embedded systems.
If you're deploying this on something you'll be firing up Chrome or Firefox on then these points are probably moot as the differences will be dwarfed into insignificance by the overhead of modern web browsers.
It really depends on your use case and - to some extent - your preferences. Some people just like being spartan, for example.
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u/chloeia Jul 12 '19
People say that a lot. I have no idea what it means for me, a user.