38.20.4. Linux distro choice
We haven’t found the ultimate distro yet, here is a summary table of trade-offs that we care about: Table 8, “Comparison of Linux distros for usage in this repository”.
| Distro | Packages in single Git tree | Git tracked docs | Cross build without QEMU | Prebuilt downloads | Number of packages |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Buildroot 2018.05 |
y |
y |
y |
n |
2k (1) |
Ubuntu 18.04 |
n |
n |
n |
y |
50k (3) |
Yocto 2.5 (8) |
? |
y (5) |
? |
y (6) |
400 (7) |
Alpine Linux 3.8.0 |
y |
n (1) |
? |
y |
2000 (4) |
-
(1): Wiki… https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Main_Page
-
(2):
ls packages | wc -
(3): https://askubuntu.com/questions/120630/how-many-packages-are-in-the-main-repository
-
(4):
ls main community non-free | wc -
(5): yes, but on a separate Git tree… https://git.yoctoproject.org/cgit/cgit.cgi/yocto-docs/
-
(6): yes, but the initial Poky build / download still took 5 hours on 38Mbps internet, and QEMU failed to boot at the end… https://bugzilla.yoctoproject.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12953
-
(7):
ls recipes-* | wc -
(8): Poky reference system: http://git.yoctoproject.org/cgit/cgit.cgi/poky
Other interesting possibilities that I haven’t evaluated well:
-
NixOS https://nixos.org/ Seems to support full build from source well. Not much cross compilation information however.
-
Gentoo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gentoo_Linux Seems to support full build from source well.