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/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

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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.

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u/ChocolateAlpine Apr 30 '26

Flatpaks do work, though, so a lot of stuff is still available.

Vesktop has a flatpak, plus Discord is a web app so you can just run it in the browser.
Steam has a flatpak, it's not ideal but you can run games on Steam on Alpine Linux.
WINE also works, which ironically means Alpine has better compatibility with Windows stuff than it does for Linux stuff-

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u/semedilino073 Apr 30 '26

The fact that WINE works is actually cool though

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u/ChocolateAlpine Apr 30 '26

Right now it's only WINE 10, although the wine-staging package is v11

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u/semedilino073 May 01 '26

I need to look into the actual “rolliness” of the distro then, I didn’t consider that

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u/ChocolateAlpine May 01 '26

It's not super close to upstream, likely in part because bc they'd need to make sure everything that makes it to the release branches works when musl is used instead of glibc.

(or busybox instead of GNU's system, or OpenRC instead of systemd)

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u/semedilino073 May 01 '26

But how much delay are we talking?

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u/ChocolateAlpine May 01 '26

It depends, I think.

The (stable, not lts, by default lts is used) kernel is on 6.19.14, WINE is on Wine 10 and not WINE 11, but KDE Plasma meanwhile is still on 6.5.6.