Hello, I was reading the Whonix.org page where it details pros/cons of building off different operating systems, but the Alpine Linux section seems to be from 2015. I think Kicksecure’s goal of providing a secure OS by default would work really well off Alpine Linux, particularly considering the progress Alpine has made in the past few years. The list on the dev site says that an OS for Whonix needs:
- Acceptable usability (they have functional builds off the latest gnome and kde desktops as described here as well as their own wiki)
- Must be somewhat popular (they are rated #30 on distrowatch, and their use has grown in recent years as they moved from mostly servers to default on many Docker builds. Recently they have also become more popular after being one of the main OS options for pinephones via pmOS and expanding to desktops. They have been featured on lists describing the best Linux distros for privacy-focused users, see here for an example)
- No legal/trademark issues (good)
- Must have a secure package manager (I won’t pretend to be an expert on this or the next few points, but it’s worth checking)
Alpine Linux is fast, slim, and dedicated to security (detailed here and in more detail here). It seems that basing Kicksecure off Alpine Linux would be much smaller and simpler than using Debian, which is huge and does not place a priority on security. For these reasons I believe it would be worth considering using Alpine Linux instead of Debian. Thanks for your time
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