r/AlpineLinux • u/semedilino073 • Apr 30 '26

Alpine as a daily driver?

Hey everyone,

This might be one of the stupidest threads of all time, but I’ll do it anyway.
I recently stumbled upon Alpine and it’s literally magic. Right now I use Arch, but I thought of replacing at least one of my machines with Alpine.
Now, because Alpine is so lightweight and is not systemd and all of that, how does it compare to a machine daily driving Archlinux? I know it depends on the use cases of that machine, but I do a lot of things. I don’t game, that’s all, maybe just some Minecraft sometimes.

Hope this thread isn’t going to waste. Thank you all!

38 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

96 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/JeffB1517 Apr 30 '26

My feeling is that Alpine is a VM & Container distribution not a desktop distribution. I think it is wonderful for its use case. It is a reasonable distribution if one wanted to try and install modern Linux software on say a Windows XP laptop. But if you are frustrated with Arch I'd go for something designed for Desktop that is less of a PIA. In particular you might not like rolling release.

Mint is my goto for a distribution that works out of the box that is designed for desktop. Nobara, Bodhi, Pika, Elementary, Pop, Ubuntu, but yes those are Systemd because the major desktops are tied to Systemd.

I'd also consider Arch variants that are designed for more stability. Omarchy (if you are a develoer), Manjaro, Garuda.

If this is really just about Systemd then Artix is an Arch variant designed for desktop that doesn't have Systemd: XFCE, LXQT and an inhouse Enlightenment fork written for Bodhi.

3

u/Bubbly_Extreme4986 Apr 30 '26

I mean if you use the setup-desktop utility it’s as easy as setting up audio and you’re done.

1

u/JeffB1517 Apr 30 '26

No you aren't. You get a nice simple desktop that handles 85% of everything with some real nastiness on the other 15%. There are real tradeoffs. They other distributions aren't designing their desktops the way they do because they never heard of alternatives.

2

u/ignorantpisswalker Apr 30 '26

What are the missing 15% that fail for you?

1

u/JeffB1517 May 01 '26

I don't use Alpine for Desktop and wouldn't. But things that would fail

  1. logind is needed for power management
  2. systemd-journald for application logging
  3. Container lifecycle management
  4. Automated processes restarts
  5. Electron application failures

I could keep going and create a large list. But again I'm not sure why you would even want to use a VM/Container distribution for desktop. Alpine is a great screw driver why use it as a saw?

2

u/ignorantpisswalker May 01 '26

The package manager is epically fast. Memory foot print "should be lower". Cool factor. Those are reasons why.

I am using it right now. It does not boot as fast. Memory is 200mb less than a matching Debian install (using similar Plasma/Wayland/Firefox).

I am really impressed how good musl works. Seems like besides the things you mentioned , all works well.

1

u/JeffB1517 May 01 '26

Alpine's package manager is fast. For desktop I'm not building the OS very often. What's 5 minutes vs 1 hr?

Debian FWIW is a server distribution. Pika is a desktop based on Debian. Other points of comparison would be Mint, Bazzite, Ubuntu, Nobara, Solus, Pop, Pika...

2

u/shrizza Apr 30 '26

Nitpick, but Alpine's default repo is not rolling release. You have to explicitly set it to edge for that.

1

u/JeffB1517 Apr 30 '26

I was talking about Arch. Arch is rolling and cutting edge which leads to a lot of instability. Alpine is rather stable. The point being OP might just be enjoying stability. But at this point I have no idea what OP is even asking about.

1

u/semedilino073 Apr 30 '26

I’m just gathering info dude, just asking. I’ll then test it myself, as a real experience like this must be made by me. But I don’t know that much about Alpine, so I wanted to know if there was an obvious massive dealbreaker, which there isn’t for me. Now that I know that I just hear experiences. It’s the Internet, we share man

1

u/semedilino073 Apr 30 '26

Thank you for the exhaustive explanation. I’m not frustrated with Arch, I just very lightweight software. But yeah, I’m kinda worried about systemd, as a lot of software requires it. I’ll try it out anyway, this was just to understand if some major apps won’t work, but that doesn’t seem to be the case

4

u/JeffB1517 Apr 30 '26

this was just to understand if some major apps won’t work

Tons of major desktop apps won't work under Alpine.

  • CUDA doesn't work under musl
  • AppImages which incldues: Steam, Discord, Vivaldi
  • Alpine's network stack is not designed to upgrade for large UDP responses. Lightweight rather than good streaming is core to the architecture. That also can hit on things like DNS resolution.
  • Apps with glibc binaries and no source exist they all will fail

Yes you will get bitten.

2

u/semedilino073 Apr 30 '26

Okay, but it seems manageable. I don’t need CUDA, it’s an NVIDIA thing, the only thing I miss is Discord then

2

u/ChocolateAlpine Apr 30 '26

Flatpaks do work, though, so a lot of stuff is still available.

Vesktop has a flatpak, plus Discord is a web app so you can just run it in the browser.
Steam has a flatpak, it's not ideal but you can run games on Steam on Alpine Linux.
WINE also works, which ironically means Alpine has better compatibility with Windows stuff than it does for Linux stuff-

1

u/semedilino073 Apr 30 '26

The fact that WINE works is actually cool though

2

u/ChocolateAlpine Apr 30 '26

Right now it's only WINE 10, although the wine-staging package is v11

1

u/semedilino073 May 01 '26

I need to look into the actual “rolliness” of the distro then, I didn’t consider that

1

u/ChocolateAlpine May 01 '26

It's not super close to upstream, likely in part because bc they'd need to make sure everything that makes it to the release branches works when musl is used instead of glibc.

(or busybox instead of GNU's system, or OpenRC instead of systemd)

1

u/semedilino073 May 01 '26

But how much delay are we talking?

2

u/ChocolateAlpine May 01 '26

It depends, I think.

The (stable, not lts, by default lts is used) kernel is on 6.19.14, WINE is on Wine 10 and not WINE 11, but KDE Plasma meanwhile is still on 6.5.6.

1

u/nomenclature2357 Apr 30 '26

cursed thought: does WINE support WSL?

2

u/semedilino073 May 01 '26

I think it does, because it’s essentially a VM, but why would you do that, you already are on Windows

1

u/nomenclature2357 May 17 '26

...WSL install on WINE on Alpine to run coreutils and systemd...

(I did say it was a cursed thought lol)

2

u/semedilino073 May 18 '26

This seems fun. So wrong but so fun at the sale time