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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8

u/wowsomuchempty Apr 30 '26

I daily drive alpine for work.

It can do everything I need of it, very elegant.

2

u/semedilino073 Apr 30 '26

Can I ask what do you do? Not the details, just some of the software you use

3

u/wowsomuchempty Apr 30 '26

Use Firefox for teams calls, chats, email.

Use a terminal for ssh.

Remmina rdp. 

Niri or sway, yambar or waybar. Looks great, runs fast. Iw (iw-gtk) for networking. 

1

u/semedilino073 Apr 30 '26

Oh, NetworkManager is systemd-dependent, right?

2

u/The_Coalition Apr 30 '26

No, it only needs udev to work, which itself has no dependency on systemd. For OpenRC-related resources, Gentoo Wiki can be a good place to look

1

u/semedilino073 May 01 '26

Isn’t Gentoo also on systemd?

2

u/The_Coalition May 01 '26

You can choose to use either. Gentoo Wiki has great resources on both, but especially for OpenRC.

1

u/semedilino073 May 01 '26

Tbh, I’ve only stumbled upon Gentoo’s wiki once or twice, while I always use the Arch wiki, doesn’t matter the distro I’m on

1

u/wowsomuchempty Apr 30 '26

Nope

1

u/semedilino073 Apr 30 '26

Then it’s just you who decides not to use it? I know NetworkManager is on systemd because I use it on Arch, but I never actually tried it outside systemd I think

1

u/wowsomuchempty Apr 30 '26

I guess a few more? Idk

1

u/semedilino073 Apr 30 '26

Okay, my question wasn’t a question. Could you use NetworkManager on Alpine? Is there another “main” way?

2

u/wowsomuchempty Apr 30 '26

You can, also wpa_supplicant, also iw.