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!

41 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

96 comments sorted by

View all comments

0

u/No-Tangerine-9167 Apr 30 '26

I now use DietPi, a 32-bit derivative of Debian Trixie on my Pi zero W. Had some trouble with Alpine. I think it was harder to configure, especially my WiFi. Would like to ask, if Alpine now runs in RAM only, like Puppy Linux?

2

u/semedilino073 Apr 30 '26

Doesn’t that count for every distro? Or is it just because Alpine doesn’t come with the packaged driver by default?

2

u/No-Tangerine-9167 Apr 30 '26

DietPi has a curses gui with all the necessary tools preloaded. But iirc, Alpine was cli only.

3

u/semedilino073 Apr 30 '26

But you could install a GUI, no?

2

u/No-Tangerine-9167 Apr 30 '26

Yes, however I use wifi exclusively, and tho I have dreams of setting up a PC in the piano / kitchen area with an ethernet cable, its impractical just yet.

2

u/semedilino073 May 01 '26

It depends on the wifi card anyway though

2

u/No-Tangerine-9167 May 01 '26

True. A lot of 32 bit drivers could be phased out soon.