Alpine has some razor edges in it. I would never default to it. Always test your app thoroughly. musl doesn't implement everything that glibc does and some of the differences can cause big problems. This is not purely theoretical. I once spent a week deugging a database corruption issue that happened because of a difference in musl's UTF-8 handling.

Use Alpine liberally for local images if you like, but don't use it for production.

"Use Alpine liberally for local images if you like, but don't use it for production."

We take the exact opposite approach: default to Alpine based images, only use another base OS if Alpine doesn't work for some reason. The majority of our underlying code base isn't C-based, so maybe that's why Alpine has been successful for us, but as always, everyone's situation is different and YMMV.

The dockerfile is optimized for “works for the most number of people out of the box”. There was debate over using the ruby v ruby-slim image. Ultimately it was decided to go with the larger image to maximize compatibility.

That said, keep using Alpine! There’s no reason for folks to stop doing what they’re already doing if it’s working for them.

The new dockerfile is meant more for people who are just getting started that aren’t familiar with Docker or Linux.

I assume because Debian/Ubuntu works more likely out of the box. I tried to use Alpine but ran into various issues in our sad big corporate setup. Additionally, ruby provides base docker images in these too.