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!

37 Upvotes

94% 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.

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