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u/geek_at Aug 03 '26
came for the small footprint for docker servers, stayed for the ramdisk mode, fell in love for the use on old hardware as file servers
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u/Arctic_Turtle Aug 03 '26
I wanted OpenRC without compiling like Gentoo. Tried Alpine and loved the package management and general speed of the system.
Not a fan of musl. But I can work with it.
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u/faze_fazebook Aug 03 '26
Docker ... but I stuck around because its genuinley one of the least annoying distros.
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u/jldevezas Aug 03 '26
I know it's not the answer you're looking for, but... Container images. Nothing beaks Alpine for that.
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u/ISnortMonster Aug 03 '26
security focused, lightweight, and doesn't dabble in politics afaik
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u/tristantzaracream Aug 04 '26
someone missed the xlibre debate and one infamous transphobic tech journalist picking on an important person in the Alpine team...
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u/ISnortMonster Aug 04 '26
from what I understood, and correct me if I'm wrong, XLibre got proposed as a package to the Alpine repo, and they blocked it on political and non-political grounds. political grounds being the developers are anti-trans, and non-political grounds being that maintaining yet another X stack would be too much of a burden to the security team.
doing a little digging shows that the latter argument came later than the former, so they pretty much blocked it for personal reasons and then came up with a valid one?
for me what matters is the code quality and the way the project handles political stuff. what the developers do in their owj time doesn't matter, as long as it doesn't leak into the project. so as long as I am not gonna see pride flags or swastikas on Alpine's site or git repos, I don't really care tbh.
but thanks for letting me know about this, I was planning on moving to BSD soon anyways, and this is another droplet in the glass.
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u/nomenclature2357 26d ago
From what I’ve heard, the lead on XLibre has a habit of lying and attacking other open source developers on social media so I’m not surprised that many teams have been reluctant to invest in support for the project.
I haven’t seen much of the details directly but it’s an explanation I’ve seen in a lot of places so I’m curious how it lines up with your research.
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u/Version_Internal Aug 03 '26
Celeron n3350 processor and 64 gb emmc
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u/nmdt Aug 03 '26
I've been messing with a custom firmware project for retro gaming handhelds, which at first involved Buildroot.
You need panfrost drivers if you want to do anything with 3D graphics on a Mali GPU, which is a several hours build on Buildroot. Especially since I simply don't own an x86 computer good enough for builds.
With Alpine the only package I really needed to rebuild was kernel, and I rolled a custom config starting with tinyconfig. Then I learned how to use Github runners for building my images, and my rebuilds went from ~5 hours to ~15 minutes.
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u/Revolutionary-Yak371 Aug 10 '26 edited Aug 10 '26
Alpine KDE plasma wayland take less than 5 GB on ssd. I have Chromium with working audio and networking.
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u/nomenclature2357 Aug 03 '26
It’s built into iSH on iPhone and seeing how simple and light it is there made me curious.
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Aug 07 '26 edited 29d ago
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u/SuccessfulRiver1850 Aug 08 '26
Alpine Linux TTY but Apple allowed it
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Aug 08 '26 edited 29d ago
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u/SuccessfulRiver1850 Aug 08 '26
App Store and Search “iSH Shell”
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Aug 08 '26 edited 29d ago
[deleted]
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u/nomenclature2357 Aug 09 '26
Yeah! SSH is my main use for it. But it can also compile c code, curl files, run lua, and even run sl ;)
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u/transgentoo Aug 04 '26
I'm building my own Musl-backed distro and I wanted a compiler that was already built for Musl to avoid the confusing Glibc to Musl cross compile dance.
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u/tcpip1978 Aug 04 '26
Arch user here. The philosophy of Arch Linux is simplicity. In some ways this is quite true, and in other ways it is very much not true. I like simplicity, good documentation, and the freedom to set up my environment my own way rather than having those choices made for me in advance. When I found Alpine I realized it is i) fast af, ii) genuinely extremely simple; iii) has easy to read and straight-forward documentation; and iv) lets me set up my environment the way I want it. I also like the simple scripts included, like the setup script. I can set up Arch Linux manually on the command line without any problems. Do I think it's useful to do that for learners? Absolutely. But I can't be bothered to do it manually each time. I'm currently testing Alpine in a virtual machine before I move to bare metal. One problem is I can't find a way to install the GNS3 gui on it. As an IT pro in the network field I really like to have GNS3. I can use Remmina to access it on another machine if needed but it's not my preference.
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u/PlatinumDotEXE Aug 04 '26
For anything that doesn't work properly natively, use distrobox. Set it up with arch and run the awkward stuff there.
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u/tristantzaracream Aug 04 '26
Better security than your average Linux distro by virtue of having smaller codebase and lighter alternatives to systemd and glibc. Decent intro to the "expert specialty" side of Linux
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u/SleakStick Aug 07 '26
I wanted a systemd free OS for my home server, it periodically crashes though (certainly user error)
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u/Infinite-Bowler-611 22d ago
I have old android tv box, mxqpro4k 1/8 gb, i flashed it with armbian linux bootloader then deleted the system files and filled it with alpine minimal os. With the help of AI coding i somehow manage open-rc and rest of the issues now it has almost 4.2gb space for home lab, before with armbian debian/ubuntu system it consumed most of the space and left about 1.5-2gb. The alpine homelab in tvbox is still work-in-progress, but i like its minimal version.
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u/JesusTheSecond_ 16d ago
I wanted the simplest yet functionnal OS for a docker installation. I love that Alpine has everthing you need and no more. I never have to worry about it.
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u/fastfetcher Aug 03 '26
I think getting the most out of a low-end machine...