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postmarketOS@postmarketOS@social.treehouse.systems (2026-09-23 21:45:48)
Five Lessons from Building Alpine Linux for 20 Years by @ncopa

"Alpine Linux began as a small, diskless distribution for routers and security appliances. It was not designed for containers, cloud computing or smartphones, yet it eventually found its way into all three.

In this talk, Alpine’s founder looks back at five lessons from more than twenty years of building and maintaining the project: how real constraints can produce unexpected opportunities, why simplicity must include the contributor experience, how being different can pay off, why neglected work eventually becomes technical debt, and why a friendly community is part of a project’s technical quality and security.

This is not a complete history or a celebration of everything Alpine got right. It is a candid account of decisions that worked, mistakes that became apparent years later, and what it takes for an open-source project to survive beyond its original purpose."
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postmarketOS@postmarketOS@social.treehouse.systems (2026-09-23 21:47:36)
10 years of postmarketOS by @ollieparanoid 

"Imagine all the things you could accomplish in ten years if each week you spend a significant amount of your time on them. You could choose a small scope project and drive it to perfection. You could probably make a lot of money, live large, get a big house and five cars. Instead of that yours truly spent his time on his favorite Linux Mobile distribution. This talk gives a look back from how it all started until now, the technical changes postmarketOS went through, how our community got bigger and better and how the mainstream operating systems got worse over time. I'll already spoil the conclusion here, what we have been building together is more meaningful than ever in 2026, I'm proud of what we have accomplished and I'm so happy I didn't do something else instead!"
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postmarketOS@postmarketOS@social.treehouse.systems (2026-09-23 21:48:38)
Rebuilding the build farm: a new package builder architecture by @fossdd , @ptrc 

"Today, we still rely on Lua scripts written over ten years ago to build all of our repositories. But Alpine has grown a lot since then: we have many new architectures (one of which, riscv64, is unbelievably slow...), and a single failing test in one package still blocks the upload of all other, unrelated packages. TL;DR: the builders are very often the bottleneck of Alpine development.

To meet our needs today, I'll propose some requirements I think a new architecture should have, along with an idea for what it could look like. Hopefully we can find some interested people and build the "Next Gen. Alpine-Builder"™."
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