When you’re choosing a base image for your Docker image, Alpine Linux is often recommended. Using Alpine, you’re told, will make your images smaller and speed up your builds. And if you’re using Go that’s reasonable advice. But if you’re using Python, Alpine Linux will quite often: Make your builds much slower. Make your images bigger. Waste your time. On occassion, introduce obscure runtime bugs. Let’s see why Alpine is recommended, and why you probably shouldn’t use it for your Python application.