[Feature] Support for ubuntu server

[brandonmathewp]

Problem Statement

Alpine is great, however i have always been drawn more towards Ubuntu.

Proposed Solution

Id like to see support added to allow using Ubuntu Server maybe.

Alternatives

Any of the debian variants would be ideal.

Use Case

Anyone who has grown accustomed to debian package management (APT)

[ExTV]

Thanks for the request. I'd genuinely like to offer a Debian-family option myself, so this isn't a flat no, but here is the honest constraint set.

Why Alpine is the host VM today

Podroid runs the guest under QEMU TCG (pure software emulation) on unprivileged Android. A normal app can't get KVM, so every guest instruction is emulated, which makes the guest's footprint matter far more than it would on bare metal:

• Image size. The rootfs ships as a squashfs baked into the APK. Alpine's base is roughly 8 MB extracted (musl + busybox); a Debian/Ubuntu base is well over 10x that (glibc + coreutils + dpkg), and that lands directly on your download and storage.
• Boot and idle cost under TCG. Ubuntu Server defaults to systemd as PID 1: parallel unit startup plus a handful of resident daemons. Under emulation that boots noticeably slower and burns more idle CPU than Alpine's busybox-init to OpenRC path that Podroid is built around.
• Init coupling. The whole guest layer (the podroid-* services, the boot-stage markers, the seamless-update machinery) is OpenRC services on the squashfs. Ubuntu + systemd isn't a config swap, it's a second guest stack to build and maintain.

You can get APT today

The actual use case here, APT and Debian-style package management, is already covered without changing the host VM. Podroid ships Podman, Docker and LXC, so you can run Debian or Ubuntu as a container (or a fuller LXC system container) on top of the Alpine VM:

podman run -it ubuntu bash
# apt update && apt install ...

That gives you apt and the Ubuntu/Debian userland right now while keeping the host lightweight.

On a native swap

If a native swap ever happens, Devuan is a more realistic candidate than Ubuntu Server, precisely because it runs without systemd (sysvinit / OpenRC / runit options), so it fits Podroid's OpenRC model far better. It's still heavier than Alpine on disk and on the glibc side, but it sidesteps the systemd-under-TCG cost. I'll keep this open as the tracking issue for a Debian-family host and look at a Devuan + OpenRC rootfs as the path of least resistance.