live-bootstrap VS bedrocklinux-userland

Not using this, but tangentially related is (full disclosure, i am a maintainer of this project) live-bootstrap, which uses about a KB of binary to do a full "Linux from scratch" style thing - read https://github.com/fosslinux/live-bootstrap/blob/master/part... for all 143 steps you have to go through to get there.

Actually you can skip a file system entirely if you do something like stage0 or live-bootstrap https://github.com/fosslinux/live-bootstrap

See https://github.com/fosslinux/live-bootstrap, and https://github.com/fosslinux/live-bootstrap/blob/master/parts.rst has all the steps we take.

live-bootstrap builds a variety of intermediate systems, starting from a <1KB binary seed (kernel excluded). Check parts.rst for a description, it's kinda wild just how many C and C subset compilers get compiled... but the end result is a system with musl and GCC 4.7, from which building the latest GCC is 2 steps away.

There is also live-bootstrap which uses a similar bootstrap chain to Guix (stage0 -> Mes -> tcc -> gcc), but without needing Guile/guix-daemon binaries etc. The whole thing starts with just a 357-byte binary seed (source)!

There's some cool stuff being done in this area. For example, live-bootstrap goes from a tiny, auditable binary seed to a full GNU userland using only source code (and a Linux kernel).

Back when I used a debian based distribution I made use of https://bedrocklinux.org/ to make use of the AUR. It's not for everyone though.

Now this is interesting... apparently it is possible to run Nix AKA "The Nix Package Manager" on Alpine -- despite the fact that Alpine is Busybox and Musl based and NixOS is Coreutils and Glibc based!

Well done Nix engineers and contributors!

(I may switch to Alpine w/Nix Package Manager in the future, depending on how well it works!)

Related:

Bedrock Linux: https://bedrocklinux.org/

Sure, just install Bedrock Linux and add the Arch stratum on top

There's a Bedrock Linux distro already...

Bedrock Linux. It is allows you to make a system out of various seemingly-incompatible parts of other distros. I haven't gotten around to trying it myself, but it's really cool.

If you want to actually use multiple distributions at once integrated tightly into each other (like using Ubuntu with AUR packages) I highly recommend https://bedrocklinux.org/. It uses some chroot and symbolic link magic to share files across filesystems.