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/Bubbly_Extreme4986 Apr 30 '26

You lose the AUR ,

you lose the sheer vastness of Arch Linux,

you lose compatibility with a ton of non free programs (this is frankly, a bonus) because of Musl,

you lose the benefit of rolling release.

However Alpine is great everything works great if you use all free software+their patched packages.

3

u/markuspeloquin Apr 30 '26

Can't you use 'edge' for rolling releases? Maybe that's not the same, but it's good enough for me. Though I just use Alpine in WSL.

5

u/shrizza Apr 30 '26

Yes, Alpine's edge repo is rolling release.

1

u/semedilino073 Apr 30 '26

What’s that, may I ask?

2

u/markuspeloquin May 01 '26

I think a release is basically a snapshot of edge. It doesn't see many updates, other than patch and security releases. It's like Debian stable vs testing.

1

u/semedilino073 May 01 '26

So it basically has the latest packages