Huh, I thought Alpine was mainly just used for Kubernetes pods and different container images. Do you actually use Alpine as a daily driver? How is it? I’m still quite new to using Linux as a desktop, so I haven’t considered it for that.
Yeah I run it as a daily driver, I wrote a little something to bootstrap it with encrypted zfs set up. I personally really like it for how stable/minimal it is, no systemd and running musl libc which I used do myself on Gentoo but as a binary distro Alpine is a lot less effort.
My whole install is under 4GB of packages and it’s very lean, there’s like 30k packages in the repos so quite decent for selection, and if you need to custom build stuff aports (like Arch Linux AUR) is pretty straightforward. Apk is also a great package manager.
There are a few caveats though, with musl libc a few things won’t work (Obligatory fuck Nvidia) since they are compiled for glibc, so for that flatpak is your friend here (I use Steam with it a lot). It also requires a bit of understanding to debug sometimes, I use the Gentoo and Arch wikis for things if the Alpine wiki is missing something.
It’s a fantastic distro though and I hardly have to maintain it/things rarely go wrong. Been running as a desktop for a few years now.
Huh, I thought Alpine was mainly just used for Kubernetes pods and different container images. Do you actually use Alpine as a daily driver? How is it? I’m still quite new to using Linux as a desktop, so I haven’t considered it for that.
Yeah I run it as a daily driver, I wrote a little something to bootstrap it with encrypted zfs set up. I personally really like it for how stable/minimal it is, no systemd and running musl libc which I used do myself on Gentoo but as a binary distro Alpine is a lot less effort.
My whole install is under 4GB of packages and it’s very lean, there’s like 30k packages in the repos so quite decent for selection, and if you need to custom build stuff aports (like Arch Linux AUR) is pretty straightforward. Apk is also a great package manager.
There are a few caveats though, with musl libc a few things won’t work (Obligatory fuck Nvidia) since they are compiled for glibc, so for that flatpak is your friend here (I use Steam with it a lot). It also requires a bit of understanding to debug sometimes, I use the Gentoo and Arch wikis for things if the Alpine wiki is missing something.
It’s a fantastic distro though and I hardly have to maintain it/things rarely go wrong. Been running as a desktop for a few years now.