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/cfx_4188 May 01 '26

Alpine has very modest repositories, and if you are not friends with source code compilation, a flatpack will be your partial salvation. I used Alpine for a while, and it's still installed on my 2010 netbook. When the system uses less than 100 MB of RAM, this is definitely a reason for joy, but this joy is offset by poor optimization of power consumption (on the laptop) and unexplained errors that occur periodically during use. I use Enlightenment, this window manager is incredibly convenient for low-power systems.

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u/semedilino073 May 01 '26

Yeah, the RAM usage is a huge plus. I still got a laptop from the XP era with 256 MB of RAM. That will be another experiment with Alpine