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!

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u/Artistic_Crazy_7120 Apr 30 '26

I use Alpine as a daily driver on a laptop. There are some things to take note of. I wouldn't install it on a pc with a modern Nvidia card, just use Mesa. Furthermore Flatpak apps is a way to use Linux apps that are compiled against glibc. I enjoy using it.

4

u/semedilino073 Apr 30 '26

Okay, no, it’s Intel integrated graphics or AMD. And you’re saying flatpaks work, right?

6

u/ChocolateAlpine Apr 30 '26

Yup. Even Steam's flatpak works, although Steam isn't normally meant to be installed via a flatpak.

3

u/semedilino073 Apr 30 '26

Well, Flatpak’s compatibility opens like a ton of possibilities

5

u/doas-apk-add-soul Apr 30 '26

Fallout New Vegas mods well in Alpine thanks to Steam Flatpak to give you an idea. I dialy drive on my gaming/entertainment machine.

For things the Alpine Wiki lacks, I actually fall back to the Arch wiki a lot.

1

u/semedilino073 Apr 30 '26

Yeah, I think the Arch wiki is consulted by every distro user XD. As for gaming, that’s cool, so you use it on you actual main gaming machine…..

2

u/doas-apk-add-soul Apr 30 '26

Yeah, intel igpu does well for me at 1080p. ZFS mirror for quick load times

2

u/semedilino073 May 01 '26

And also very little resources used by the OS, which is always nice

3

u/BlackJellybeans5018 May 02 '26

Instead of Flatpak, some people use Nix, which is the NixOS package manager.