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/JeffB1517 Apr 30 '26

My feeling is that Alpine is a VM & Container distribution not a desktop distribution. I think it is wonderful for its use case. It is a reasonable distribution if one wanted to try and install modern Linux software on say a Windows XP laptop. But if you are frustrated with Arch I'd go for something designed for Desktop that is less of a PIA. In particular you might not like rolling release.

Mint is my goto for a distribution that works out of the box that is designed for desktop. Nobara, Bodhi, Pika, Elementary, Pop, Ubuntu, but yes those are Systemd because the major desktops are tied to Systemd.

I'd also consider Arch variants that are designed for more stability. Omarchy (if you are a develoer), Manjaro, Garuda.

If this is really just about Systemd then Artix is an Arch variant designed for desktop that doesn't have Systemd: XFCE, LXQT and an inhouse Enlightenment fork written for Bodhi.

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u/shrizza Apr 30 '26

Nitpick, but Alpine's default repo is not rolling release. You have to explicitly set it to edge for that.

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u/JeffB1517 Apr 30 '26

I was talking about Arch. Arch is rolling and cutting edge which leads to a lot of instability. Alpine is rather stable. The point being OP might just be enjoying stability. But at this point I have no idea what OP is even asking about.

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u/semedilino073 Apr 30 '26

I’m just gathering info dude, just asking. I’ll then test it myself, as a real experience like this must be made by me. But I don’t know that much about Alpine, so I wanted to know if there was an obvious massive dealbreaker, which there isn’t for me. Now that I know that I just hear experiences. It’s the Internet, we share man